


The Impressionist

by reckonedrightly



Series: The Image of a Man [3]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: A Scandal in Bohemia, Alternate Universe, Drug Use, F/F, Gender Roles, Genderbending, Genderqueer Character, Other, Queer Themes, Spectrum Sliding, Tribadism, Victorian Attitudes, people staring out of windows like they're in a BBC period drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-29
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-11-27 11:33:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 67,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/661522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reckonedrightly/pseuds/reckonedrightly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“They do say an Englishman’s home is her castle,” she remarked finally, quiet and calm, then let the words settle in the empty air and glanced tentatively upwards, as if ascertaining that nothing had changed; that the world was still standing in the wake of her saying that aloud.</p><p>—</p><p>1889. Paradoxically, the rules of society protect Sherlock Holmes. As long as her secret is unthinkable, it is undetectable—until she meets the sharp, scandalous and startlingly free Irene Adler, who thinks of everything. A retelling of A Scandal in Bohemia, complete with a thousand disguises, lies and masks, a secret buried in the artistic world of late nineteenth century Paris and revenge against royalty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "Just not what I'd call a gentleman, myself."

**Author's Note:**

> The Impressionist stands alone, plot-wise: everything should make sense without reference to the other stories in the series. However, for characterisation reasons, and because I like them, I would recommend reading both [Hercules in Her Chamber](http://archiveofourown.org/works/649532) and [The Heart Where You Want To Be](http://archiveofourown.org/works/689682) beforehand. Go on, they're short.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A fair warning: there are some historical personages touched upon here. The most prominent is _highly_ fictionalised. More on that later!
> 
> A note on dates: allow me to scream.
> 
> Watson dates A Scandal in Bohemia as having occurred in 1888. Baring-Gould, whose chronology is probably the most well-known, and whose work I was originally prepared to accept because dear God, I didn’t want to write my own timeline, dates it at 1887, arguing that Watson would have fudged details to protect identities. Which he certainly did, in this universe! Except that Watson is a newly-wed in A Scandal in Bohemia, and it is generally accepted that Mary Morstan became Mary Watson in late ‘88, early ‘89. (Unless of course, you’re Baring-Gould, and you think he was married to someone else entirely, but I’m going to just...gently deposit that theory into the sea because it makes things too complicated and I like Mary). For this reason, the date of the events which the story of The Scandal in Bohemia was based on shall be considered to be 1889.

> **im·pres·sion·ist, n.**
> 
> _1\. An artist, composer, or writer who practices or upholds the theories of Impressionism, a 19th century artistic movement associated with Montmartre, Paris._
> 
> _2\. One who imitates another._

**9th March, 1889**  
  
“If you do not unhand my maid,” Irene Adler said, very calmly, levelling her pistol, “I will shoot... _one_ of you through the head.” 

The two men before her stood frozen in their black masks. Hanging between them in her nightdress, with a gloved hand clamped tightly over her mouth, Beth gave another frantic struggle. Her scream had woken the house. “Only one of you,” Irene said, quite amicably. “For I should like to leave one alive to testify that I shot in defence of my staff—and indeed that you both pre-empted the event by breaking into my house. Now, the only question is— _which_ ?”  
  
Later, when the police had dragged the two burglars off—both of them entirely alive—and left the whole household to face the dawn in a state of strange, sleepless shock, and when Beth had been wrapped tightly in a blanket and told rather forcefully not to move from where she was seated beside the fire in the sitting room, Irene folded herself into the armchair opposite, and began, helplessly, to laugh. Her hand folded over her face.  
  
“Ma’am?”  
  
“Oh, Beth...”  
  
“Are you alright?”  
  
“It is just—it was a stage pistol,” Irene said, still laughing, wiping her eyes with a shaking hand. “A souvenir from—a long time ago. Had I pulled the trigger, those robbers would have gotten a scare and...and absolutely nothing else. Oh, if only I had been on a stage. I would have been the toast of the theatrical world.”

**20th March, 1889**

The image of a man at the window of 221B Baker Street was one which the street's more earthly inhabitants were quite accustomed to. Silhouetted there, Sherlock Holmes’ figure was sharp, dark and featureless against the inner glow of that Baker Street living room from which London’s foremost criminal agent had practised for eight years now. Spread out on the other side of the windows, the city was something like a human body, with all its cobbled arteries clogged with hurrying feet and the clatter of carriage wheels, urchins and ostlers and ladies with bustles like ships’ sterns, moving in streaks of colour through the yellowed and greyed streets. In the grander parts, London was tamed into townhouses, defining itself as what was most practical.

Arguably, Sherlock Holmes had come into the world en route to London (on the four-fifteen, in fact, from York). Holmes, having had more time and reason to consider the matter than most, disagreed with said argument. Sherlock Holmes had come into the world on the January 6th, 1854—but had for seventeen years masqueraded under the name of Violet.

Her breath steamed up the glass; she had caught herself smiling, and was eerily aware of it having gone on for too long. She frowned, wondering what the matter was—ah. Watson had not inquired as to what she was smiling about. This was because Watson was not there.

She swerved, presenting London squarely with her tweed-suited back as if suddenly offended by it. Upon her desk lay an opened letter, tucked half back inside its envelope, the seal broken. It was written on thick, creamy paper—with a crest neatly cut off at the top. Its presence was such that she had felt it at the small of her back even during her contemplation of the city which sprawled outside her window. Her lips thinned, expression souring.

Well, she could grant that its sender hadn’t been so foolish as to use the paper proscribed for the official business of that grand house he belonged to; this, if she was not very much mistaken, was in fact the sort favoured by a certain Lady Greville, by all accounts and indeed by her own observations a very dear friend of the man who (the note informed her) would arrive tonight. Having previously glanced at a request that she mediate between said lady and another woman’s husband, to whom Lady Greville had ill-advisedly sent a letter (“Well, madam, unless you wish me to steal it back—” “If that is what it takes, Mr Holmes, then that is what I wish.”) Holmes was familiar with her preferred stationery. She sniffed. She had, after all, never extended any invitation to her expected visitor, and while she knew his home address, it would be of little use.

“I abhor intrusion—” The sentence was weighted in expectation of the _Watson_ which never came, through she took the breath before it; the absence of the name left it sounding unfinished. The silence staggered, not expecting its cue so quickly. Holmes tapped her fingers in the unsteady lull. “They do say an Englishman’s home is her castle,” she remarked finally, quiet and calm, then let the words settle in the empty air and glanced tentatively upwards, as if ascertaining that nothing had changed; that the world was still standing in the wake of her saying that aloud.

At university, she had written long letters to Mycroft, arrogant and daring, revelling in newfound double meanings; "Your news made me the most cheerful man in Clare College for approximately ten seconds... (and here some news of her lectures, some philosophical remark, some inelegant leap of subject which would cause Mycroft to devote a paragraph to a criticism of her style) ...and yet the people here with whom I feel the most kinship are undoubtedly the laundresses..." There had been less to lose then.

London ticked onwards. The room remained stationary. Holmes’ eyebrows flickered and she looked down again, losing interest in the outside world now that it felt no longer fragile, though a slight satisfaction flared in her.

It faded quickly. She picked the offending letter up, out of its envelope—but without having reread it, she gave an irritated sigh and threw it back down. It was blatantly obvious, all of it; who was coming tonight and why he wished to consult her. If only her mind did not crave details and exact classifications, she would have been able to ignore his visit.

Perhaps.

“A Royal visitor, Watson,” she remarked idly to empty air. Watson, of course, was married now. “I imagine you would be unable to contain your pride. Or indeed your urge to tidy the rooms.” At this, she glanced absently over the papers which littered the living room of 221B, and considered it—but decided against it.

Outside, London—undeceptively brutal, building its own facts and living them out—never stilled. In the dark, some streets away from Baker Street, it occurred to a certain doctor, attempting to navigate his way home from a late house-call, that he ought to pay a visit to an old friend—a man named Sherlock Holmes.

 

*

There was never anything so dangerous as the name Godfrey, Irene Adler thought, as she pushed her lover harder back against the pillows with her mouth and hands and hips and knees. Godfrey—it would light up in her brain at exactly the wrong moment. Godfrey. Every time its syllables glinted in her mind it gave her the strangest sensation of having just dropped her belongings in the street—as if she were staggering to remain upright, clutching her hat and watching money roll away from her, unsure what she should run after first. She licked into her lover’s mouth. _Godfrey_. Every time she thought it, it would make her want to dig her fingers into something, out of a sheer desire to feel the world closer to her—or to hang on for dear life, afraid to fall off the earth’s skin. She satisfied herself by clutching at the pillows and at deep russet curls which did not belong to her, her body rippling against the body beneath. Hipbones ground hard into hipbones.

“Oh!” An opera singer in bed! Godfrey had teased her about that, told her to try and be quiet, not because they were not safe where they were but as a game of restraint; she had laughed full of love and defiance and interrupted herself with a moan as Godfrey’s mouth had dipped between her hot and sweat-slicked thighs, and Irene had run a hand down; over her breasts, her open bodice and unhooked corset, her pulled-up chemise, down; over her skirts, rumpled up, splashed around her hips, down; down to shove her fingers through Godfrey’s short, dark hair—

“Godfrey,” Irene Adler gasped, the name aching as her body arched, and then, “Ah.”

Her lover’s rusty head shot up from where it was turned delicately against the pillows, lips parting not in ecstasy but bewilderment, forcing Irene to adjust her balance and straighten up, flush-faced and slightly dilapidated between her lover's thighs. Irene's cravat was half way around her neck. Her shirt was sticking to her. There was nothing beneath it but sweat-slicked skin.

“My name is _Henrietta_ ,” Irene's lover Henrietta said, as if unsure of the fact herself, one red corkscrew curl falling in front of her baffled expression. Her grip on Irene's shirt warily unfolded. “You have known me for _months_.”

Outside, clouds moved away from the sun and it tried to burn through the light golden curtains, throwing a half-light on the scene. Henrietta was circled by a froth of cream skirts, her drawers around one ankle and her riotous ringlets on the verge of avalanche—there was a streak of the same red curls glistening between her legs, where could also be found Irene Adler frozen in dread and in half a man’s suit, all golden and brown, her thick black hair wound up in the plainest fashion. They stared at each other as if unable to look away, both trapped. “Who on earth is Godfrey?” Henrietta asked. The word stretched out into the room, Henrietta’s features distorting as she progressed through stages of confusion and then deduction; her mouth opened, snapped closed.

“A mistake,” Irene beseeched. “Simply a slip of the tongue. Godfrey is an old husband. Dead. Oh—estranged; as good as dead.” Panicked nonsense. There was anxiety in her voice. _Damn_. Henrietta was staring at her, and Irene resorted to plaintively stretching out her coppery American vowels as she breathed, “Darling, forgive me.”

Henrietta still stared; the silence mounted until Irene thought she would crack in two if they remained silent and stationary a moment longer, and so reached out and slid her hand from the side of Henrietta’s face around to the back of her neck, for she could see that lingering, confused lust in Henrietta’s eyes which comes from wanting someone suddenly revealed to be fraudulent. Past attraction tugged against present doubt, and something told her that this was exciting. It was all entirely visible upon Henrietta’s open face. If she could just get her to kiss her again, Irene was sure that the rupture would cease to be a rupture and Henrietta would relax under her once more. They would fall back into the pool of white sheets together and forget it all. She wanted Henrietta’s softness beneath her, wanted to hold her down, feel her rut with her legs spread, with Irene’s hips between her thighs—and they would be pressed together, and there would be—that gentle give beneath her, delicate and wild—

It didn’t happen. Henrietta jerked away and Irene pushed herself backwards; there was a rippling explosion of offence which propelled Henrietta to her feet, pulling up her drawers and rucking out her skirts with angry rustles from where they were caught up around her legs. “If you must lie, Irene, you might put a little effort into it,” she snapped, half at Irene and half to the fastenings of her bodice. Irene was tempted to put her hands over her face and laugh horribly at that. Instead she stayed put on the bed, bare hip against the sheets, propped up on one arm with her drawers and trousers around her thighs and her hair tumbling down from where she had pushed it behind her head.

“Henrietta,” she said quietly, just as Henrietta had finally—with shaking hands—buttoned herself into respectability, save for how her cheeks were flushed with anger and arousal, her eyes wet, her shoulders occupied by fine tremors. She was remarkably beautiful in a way which had little to do with why Irene wanted to pin her down onto the bed (murmuring, hushing, pushing) and take her for everything she had. “My dear.”

“What?” Henrietta replied, dropping the word like something was disgusted with. “What can you possibly have to say? More of your autobiographical fiction? Do save it for someone who will publish it.”

“I might perhaps have to say _sorry?_ ”

“Sorry! Yes, I believe you’re sorry! About ‘Godfrey’,” Henrietta pronounced with all the delicacy of scorn. The name clunked into the silence and the coolness which was expanding between them, pushing them apart. It sounded unforgivably male and hard-edged. “Are you _married_?”

“No!”

“Are you—are you then in _love_ with this Godfrey?”

Irene’s sticky thighs were cooling off in the suddenly chilly air; goosebumps had risen even where she was clothed, and there was anger in her voice when she said, “Yes.”

Henrietta, Irene saw, was picturing her falling into the arms of this man Godfrey, with Irene dressed in the suit she would strut around in when Henrietta came to call; traitorous to Henrietta's idea of Irene. ("If it makes you feel better," Irene had said—not without tenderness—to Henrietta after the first time, Henrietta’s cheek against the space between Irene’s collarbone and left breast, "you are welcome to call me John and be done with it.")

Henrietta was shaking. “I had thought,” she said, fingers picking hysterically at her tumbledown ringlets, casting around for her shawl, “I had thought you were—that you felt as I did, that you were—just like me, in your own way. Now I see.”

There were such a lot of things Irene felt she could say in that moment; they crowded her throat, made her heart sting behind the bars of her ribs. Poor girl. Irene wasn’t at all in love with her—but poor girl. “Your shawl is downstairs,” Irene told her.

Even the curtains seemed to slump when Henrietta left the room, but Irene remained rigid, posed as casually and as strictly as a statue. She only wilted, curling inward upon herself, when she could hear Henrietta descending the stair in disjointing, stumbling steps. Then, upon the bed, Irene put her forehead to her tweed-trousered knee and bit her lip, her breathing loud in the little echo chamber she had made of her body.

Her fingers curled in the fabric of her trouser leg—her breath was hot against her own thigh. She braced her other hand against the bedsprings, and she muttered, “Damn.” Her shoulders shook for a second before she took a deep gulp of air and marshalled herself into calm. She uncurled herself and wiped a hand across her face.

She could not have told Henrietta anything about it, she told herself sternly. Not about Godfrey, not about the Prince, not about Sherlock Holmes. There was no reason to burden Henrietta with anything needlessly complicated. Henrietta would not have been comforted; Irene would have been exposed, her plans endangered merely by speaking them aloud. That was all.

Irene shoved herself up off the bed to tug up her trousers, fingers deft and rough on the fastenings; she tucked in her shirt and straightened her cravat, reaching for her waistcoat. She had only wanted—what had she wanted? An escape from this constant feeling of being unbalanced, perhaps. Henrietta had never made her feel as if she had dropped something or as if she were ready to drop to the floor herself. With Henrietta, there was a reassuring sense of nothing mattering in the slightest, unlike when Irene was with—Godfrey Norton. Again. The damn name.

She was singing tonight, she remembered. Her hands clutched in her hair—oh, she should bathe, she thought irritably. She needn’t have bothered getting dressed at all.

“Beth!”

Beth glided in; English servants, Irene thought, were such quiet, breathy things, gusting here and there with patient alacrity. When she entered the room, Beth brought a monochrome breeze of calm which the peacock disaster of the bedroom seemed to shrink from; Irene often thought that she would have to study precisely how Beth managed to be so self-contained, for it was a role Irene could not imagine playing, which only made her want to conquer it.

Beth made no mention of Irene’s garb, nor Henrietta’s hurried exit, nor even the rumpled sheets of the bed, as Irene requested a bath be drawn and all visitors for the rest of the day be turned away save for one particular person, who was certain not to arrive. A moment of hesitation supplied her with another caveat. “If an unfamiliar man arrives, or anyone calling himself Sherlock Holmes, you must tell him that I am not home, and that he should call upon me tomorrow.”

“Sherlock Holmes, madam?” Beth said, with her eyebrows sliding peacefully upwards with a wry pleasure. Irene frowned at her, never entirely sure what to make of her; doubtless she had more than proved herself a valuable asset and intensely loyal servant, chiefly because Irene paid her a king’s ransom, preferring to gamble with money than try her chances with the fickle whims of other people’s morality, and yet Irene was uncertain quite what her tone meant. So full of Norton and Henrietta were her thoughts that it took her a moment before the undertone of Beth’s question made any sense; of course, when it clicked into place, Irene laughed.

“I assure you it is nothing of the sort,” Irene promised her, with a wry, secret richness about her mouth which implied that perhaps it was; indeed, the smile whispered, it almost certainly was, and only Beth had been sharp enough to spot it. There. Beth left the room a moment after giving a shy, sly smile in return, obviously feeling rather blessed by the confidence Irene had placed in her. She would be satisfied with the private scandal, and with keeping the secret for the pleasure of it. The ease of the deception was reassuring, but Irene Adler hated to need reassurance. Left alone, she permitted herself to sigh.

It was a relief to leave the bedroom; she had failed to realise how strong Henrietta’s choice of scent was until she could breathe in the scent of light ash from the new-panelled corridor, and then the chaos of tonics, serums and Parisian fragrances which inhabited the dressing room, the ghosts of a thousand hair-dressings past. Irene’s walking clothes hit the floor in a succession of heavy tweed thumps, and she stretched, bare and sweat-chilled. A faint physical arousal still thumped between her thighs, but it felt ignorable and irritating. A belly-ache of need.

She had wanted someone to impress her will upon, she thought glumly, pulling pins out of her hair and letting it fall across her back in a sheath of tight dark curls. She had wanted someone who had a certain wild softness, young enough and old enough to be impossible to truly damage; she had wanted to take some lovely, fresh girl in her arms and remind herself of all the fun she had always been so good at having. Her fingers folded her hair into an unruly braid to keep it out of the water, where it might await Beth’s care until after she had washed the smell of Henrietta off her skin. How she had wanted to forget this whole delicate, difficult business.

Irene's mind lingered on a letter she had known she would have to write when she had first met Godfrey Norton—oh, not now, she thought, annoyed. Not yet.

“Bath’s ready, ma’am,” came Beth’s call through the door which separated dressing room and bathroom.

“Thank you, that will do,” Irene called, and entered the bathroom as soon as she had heard Beth leave by way of the second door.

The curtain, thick and green, was pulled back, and the bath poured steam into the air above it. Standing as it did in the centre of the room, it possessed the air of an altar, and Irene sank into it with appropriately grateful idolatry, leaning her head on the curved rim and shutting her eyes as the water closed over her. The islands of her breasts and knees surfaced, the mainland of her shoulders rising up from the water in smooth, golden mountains.

For some reason, it was only then that she felt blessedly alone. In the steam, Irene Adler breathed.

She could consider the phrasing of that letter. She could warm up her voice for tonight. But she did neither of these things. Instead, her hand slipped below the water, finger drawing a line beneath the swell of her left breast, where it met her torso, then kneading hard—like Godfrey might and Henrietta would never, because Henrietta would rather pretend that Irene was flat and hard as a man—yes. (Call me John and be done with it). She would like Godfrey’s hands upon her breasts, and then her stomach, cupping, smoothing, stroking—

And yet the thought of that _give_ she had wanted suddenly made itself known once more, the way in which Henrietta’s hips would shudder under hers, incoming tiny trembles and Henrietta’s little ‘ah, ah, ah’s—Irene’s hand dove down between her legs, the other snatching now at the side of the bath, splashes mingling with laboured breathing—oh damn them, she would imagine them both.

(But what would she _wear_ , in that case?)

Oh! Irrelevant! The water was rippling around her now in a rhythm she set with the rocking of her hips, lapping over her skin in regular tides. Soft liquid sounds disturbed the warm air. Irene Adler gave a soft sigh which mangled itself into a growl as her knuckles paled on the side of the bath-tub. Her hips jolted up; there was a squeak as her foot slipped against the inner wall of the tub, and as Godfrey clenched a large hand in Irene’s hair and Henrietta rippled beneath her, trembling and giving. She would kiss them both, at once, with Henrietta mouthing softly at the corner of her lips and Godfrey’s tongue finding secret places inside her mouth. She would let Godfrey slide a hand where she was pressed against Henrietta, explore them both. She would lick Henrietta’s flavour from between Godfrey’s fingers as she rocked and pitched and keened. She would watch them, Godfrey’s dark, tall body almost eclipsing pink-and-red Henrietta, and oh, they would, she would, she would, she was—

Finished, still but for light shivers, quiet but for the sound of the water. It was too much, she thought, her mind hazy in the aftermath of pleasure; too hazy, unfortunately, to lie to her. It was simply too much. Something would have to be done.

She would write it as Beth dressed her hair; she would send it with a messenger before she drove out tonight. She suspected she would sing better for it.

 

*

221B Baker Street held an air of eerie, shocked calm in the aftermath of its recent visitor’s requests. The two inhabitants of the room were lost in frowning thought. Only the fire seemed immune to silence the intruder had left in his wake, crackling irreverently.

“Well, good-night, Watson,” said Sherlock Holmes, breaking the silence with a suddenly decisive tone as she turned away again from the window, where she had been watching the retreat of the brougham which had ferried her latest client to and from her door. “If you will be good enough to call tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock I should like to chat this little matter over with you.”

“‘Little matter’, Holmes?” Watson inquired. “A prince has just requested your services.”

Watson did not know. Holmes glanced at him, glanced away and shrugged. “A small matter of earthly standing.” Her fingers circled through the dimly-lit air as if she were painting with her cigarette smoke, half lazy and half didactic. Grey whirls faded in the air. “I have dealt with jilted lovers before. It is only one more failed love affair.” Watson gave a huff of astounded laughter, and Holmes a flicker of a reptilian smile a second after, dropping into the armchair opposite him. When her smile consented to lie down, she remarked, “You shall have to alter this one considerably when you write it out, dear chap.”

“I have no plans to start writing anything more just yet. You know I am still working on the story of the sign of—”

“Oh, romantic nonsense. You only like it because you met your wife through it. Surely this is to your tastes, though? An adventuress and a philandering prince? You must disguise him, of course. There is a lot of scope here for your creative powers.”

“I shall promote him to King, and you shall pretend not to be flattered by the glory of having one so illustrious consult you. I could make him an Emperor, in fact.”

“King. Let us not get carried away. And I believe I have just said that I don’t care for earthly standing. If I did, I should be feeling some conflict.”

“Would you, indeed?”

“Yes.” Holmes sniffed out smoke. “The man strikes me as a somewhat pointless specimen, despite his position. I bade you good-night, did I not?”

“Good-night, Holmes,” Watson said with an air of wry patience, as he pushed himself up from the armchair and reached for coat and hat to leave. “You will mull over this in your usual companionable manner, then?”

“Hm!" She had already begun to do just that, and had to pry herself slowly from the grip of a theory. “Oh, indeed. Off with you to Mrs Watson; I would hate her to believe I am taking up too much of her husband’s time.”

“I shall interpret that as your sending your regards. Good-night,” Watson laughed, leaving the room.

Holmes raised her voice so that it might be audible on the stairwell, gaze intent on the cigarette she was busily stubbing out; “Your stories prove that I have no say in how you interpret my actions, but I assure you you think too charitably of my manners!”

“I shall leave the reasoning to you if you shall leave the writing to me!” came the muted call, as Watson attempted to balance an unwillingness to wake Mrs Hudson with a desire to make his voice reach his friend. Holmes’ mouth flickered once more. “Good-night!” His footsteps faded upon the stairwell, and Holmes heard the door admit him into London’s chilly early-year embrace.

Three good-nights, Holmes thought, folding herself up in the armchair and staring at the fire. Let him not be going the way of Trevor. The thought, of course, was a tactical one—something upon which she could hang the jabbering, irrelevant part of her conscious mind in order to keep it out of her way while her brain’s deeper, more coarse machinery churned the basic matter of the problem into something mentally palatable. She closed her eyes and took a breath like one readying herself to dive—and then did just that, holding air inside her lungs and letting her thoughts close over her head. Her mind stretched toward the dissolute parts of the problem with grasping fingers.

Irene Adler. The Prince of Wales. A compromising photograph. Hardly his first, she imagined; he had been called as a witness (though not—and England might breathe, Holmes thought, a sigh of relief—a co-respondent) in the Mordaunt divorce case, had he not? And indeed, everybody knew his taste for actresses and singers. But then there had been no proof...

Holmes’ knee moved rhythmically up and down, suddenly frantic; she commanded herself still, a mental biting down. She scowled. There had been some proof, she pointed out to herself. There must have been. Any action will leave evidence, in its consequences, in its reaction, there is nothing unknowable; and the Prince of Wales had most definitely committed indiscretions. How had he hidden them before? Not by consulting a private detective, at least; he had only come to her because she had proven herself to be both trustworthy and the best in the country. Holmes turned the thought over, checking absently for any sign of hubris which might bias her deductions, but found it perfectly truthful.

What he had asked her to do would be nothing particularly challenging, Holmes thought in conclusion, exhaling heavily and feeling the expected complaint from her torso—the ache of her constricted chest punctuated by thin, chafing lines where bandages dug into her skin, mapping out her body in lines of familiar pain. The mystery she wanted to solve—the mystery she had been steered away from solving—might offer slightly more stimulation.

What did Irene Adler have, how had Irene Adler avoided giving it up so far, and what did Irene Adler _want?_

Another thoughtfully painful exhalation nearly sent her coughing, and she stood up, extinguishing the fire with a sudden brutality of movement, more through a desire for action than because she wanted it put out. In the quiet and the smoke she stood still, surrounded by papers detailing criminal history from the entire length of her practice. She tugged her mouse-coloured dressing-gown around her, glanced at Watson’s empty armchair, and turned to sweep from the room—but then looked back, and crossed it in order to pick up the small bag which the Prince had deposited upon her desk, weighing it in her hand. A smile crept onto her face. She would not have called herself a monetary man, but the weight of one thousand pounds, particularly one thousand pounds formerly belonging to someone unpleasant, felt distinctly encouraging in her hand. Her smile faded quickly, however, and she left for the bedroom, pulling herself into the comforting confines of her mind. Putting out the fire had been a mistake. It had made the sitting room seem larger, and more obviously empty.

Watson _did not know_ —ugh. She ran a hand over her face, grimace twisting her mouth for a moment. Really? Was this to be a night when her own thoughts would chase her around her empty rooms, darting indecisively between books and papers and tobacco and violin and Moroccan leather case?

Holmes slammed her bedroom door needlessly, as if in order to stress to her own mind that no, it would not be. She had a case.

 

*

The next day greeted London with a white sky like a blank expression. The city’s early morning citizens straggled out onto the streets—the shopkeepers, the factory workers, ladies of the night unearthly in the peculiar pale chill of the morning light. There came the early morning yells, the bangs of the world being hastily constructed lest its luckier classes roll out of bed too early and set their eyes upon harsh reality. Drunks were peeled off the streets by coppers just peeled from beds. Carriage wheels rattled. Babies wailed in the dawn.

Ensconced in bed, Irene Adler sighed with pretty despair as the curtains were drawn back; she weighed up the squares of sky she could see before deciding that they were highly inauspicious and rolling over, reaching for the sleep she’d just emerged from, when a thought jolted her to sudden wakefulness.

She shot up, curls unwinding hectically from her nighttime plait, and demanded of her maid, “Is there any reply to my letter?”

But all Beth said from the doorway was, “No, ma’am,” and so Irene Adler slumped back into the pillows and gave no answer but a grimace. Beth shut the door quietly—for Miss Adler liked to be woken up early to give herself the chance of stretching out the day as long as she could, but she also liked the freedom to return to sleep should the day strike her as not worth it.

Out on the street before Miss Adler's house, a red-faced and shabby-looking groom chomped and sucked noisily on the end of his pipe.

It was fortunate that the street was clear and quiet on this particular morning, Holmes thought, or this groom she was currently imitating would be taken for a burglar, sneaking around the edges of a well-to-do woman’s house as he was. Upon the considered realisation that, broadly speaking, this was almost the truth of the matter, she shoved the groom’s pipe back in her mouth and bit down irritably. There was nothing, at any rate, to be gained from the inspection of Miss Adler’s abode; it was a house built for people who wished to live in the country but had wound up living in London with a small fringe of garden with which to soothe their need for rolling hills. It was a place of squares and straight lines. It was, in short, as pleasant and tedious as Miss Adler apparently wasn’t. The groom’s tufty and yellowed moustache twitched as Holmes’ mouth gave a glint of what was almost a smile.

In the nearby mews, the groom put his experience to work in helping the ostlers rub down their horses, listening to the casual chat between them in amongst the warm, animal scent and the horses’ nervous whinnying. Their favourite topic, Holmes was glad to find, was none other than the fabled Miss Irene Adler.

Despite not being particularly inclined towards trusting other people’s deductions, Holmes nevertheless listened, piecing together Irene Adler from second-hand sources in the quiet privacy of her brain, allowing the groom to go about the business of manipulating her limbs and giving appropriate grunts to punctuate her more garrulous companions’ conversation. They moved to a public house with much shoving and agreeable shouting in each other’s ears, where the groom ignored the early hour and his fundamental fictitiousness to take the glass of half and half pressed upon him and accept another fill of pipe tobacco; something about his wryly taciturn nature and willingness to listen to the biographies of all the people upon the street—though particularly that one lady who was the apple of each man’s eye—had made him suddenly popular. Locked away from it all, Holmes created a patchwork Irene Adler and from there extrapolated, mind clicking through possibilities and discarding them in a matter of minutes, as the groom chewed on the end of his pipe, squinting at the ostler most in love with Miss Adler.

“Shame she’s, uh—” The man’s eyebrows moved in a complicated and meaningful way; Holmes clamped down on the urge to give him a look of arch interest, and instead let the groom snicker out pipe smoke, nodding knowingly.

“Got a gentleman, has she,” the groom leered into his pipe, to the general amusement of the entire ground

“Got a _gentleman_ , yeah. Manner of speaking. Just not what I’d call a _gentleman_ , myself. Godfrey Norton.” The ostler chopped up the four syllables of the man’s name, each more sneeringly affected than the last, finally reaching such great heights of ridicule that one of his fellows slapped him on the back—half encouraging, half as if to stop him choking on own scorn. There was a low ripple of communal mirth. “I dunno. Those opera singers—you hear stories, you just don’t expect to see ‘em happening in front of your eyes right as you’re trying to do a day’s work, do you? Not that it don’t liven things up a bit.”

“Women,” the groom remarked, in a tone of grave conclusion, to the general agreement of all his new cohorts; _interesting_ , thought Sherlock Holmes.

Godfrey Norton, she learned, would always return to the Inner Temple after meeting the by now near-mythical Miss Adler; and yet, as one man put it, “he’s been called to the bar and I’m next in line to the throne". He was handsome enough, they grudgingly agreed, the sort of handsome women liked but men didn’t respect—and he didn’t tip, didn’t talk, never had a nice word for nobody. Holmes soaked up the information. The groom’s sleeve soaked up beer. His character was growing thin. She had kept up disguises for much longer—the thought, and the fact that it took her a moment to understand her own private joke, made her have to disguise her laugh as a cough and suffer being slapped on the back—but the dull riot of the public house was grating on her. She was full of sudden desire to move and mull over her new findings. The groom bid his companions a farewell, and proceeded to lose himself in the surrounding streets, while Holmes shed a little of his gait; the constant stumbling had become wearying.

What, then? To return to Briony Lodge, and look for any hint of its legendary occupant? Or to head in the direction of Temple Church, so as to better investigate this gentleman-who-wasn’t, the distinctly interesting Godfrey Norton, whose presence made the problem a somewhat more complex one? She allotted him his place in the equation, and found herself wandering (hands in her pockets, bow-legged, the groom’s gait returning the closer she drew) back in the direction of Briony Lodge. Her legs moved independently of her churning mind, carrying her in a stumbling swagger around corner after corner, once shoulder-shoving a man unfortunate enough to assume the groom staggering towards him was sober enough to get out of the way.

It was in crossing the street upon which Irene Adler lived that two things happened; she saw a woman’s silhouette at the window of Briony Lodge, and she heard the rattle of a hansom cab in her left ear.

 _This groom is drunk_ , she thought, and _someone has paid that cab-driver to go as quickly as possible_ , and then, _this groom would not have the reflexes of a thirty four year old boxer_ , and just as she could hear the driver trying to marshal the horse under frantic control, people shouting for the groom to move and the ring of horseshoe on cobbles, _now_ —

 

*

Irene Adler’s breath crystallised on the window as she gave a sharp huff. Some half-drunk ostler had nearly gotten himself killed, poor fool, and was staggering off like he couldn’t quite understand what had just happened—but what had attracted her to the window was the urgent clamour of horses' hoofs on the street outside, and an instinctive knowledge of who it must be.

Her heart shuddered, and she realised she should not be at the window at all, for anyone could be watching. She pushed herself hastily away and sank back onto the sofa, where she could not be seen by any outside gawker. Her hand fluttered at her chest. Godfrey. It must be Godfrey.

The room held a soft, early morning quiet. Squares of white light rested stationary on the scrubbed floorboards. Its stillness was somehow incomprehensible. Irene heard a second’s burst of street-sound as the front door opened, and then she heard Godfrey’s voice rumbling in the corridor, brusque and hard. She dropped her hand from her chest, making herself cool as her sitting room—as if her body were a mere accessory to her own taste in fashionable interiors—and angled her face expectantly upwards towards the door with a calmness ready to be defiant should it have to be.

The door swung open, sliding a half circle across the floor, allowing Godfrey to flood into the room and steal all its breathable air, Irene felt, her lungs suddenly starving. Godfrey looked smooth and dark in a suit so black that it was oily and almost treacherous against the pale stillness of Irene’s sitting room.

She was as handsome as rumoured; she was always more handsome than Irene remembered.

There were, perhaps, always women like Godfrey Norton, who had been called Greta for thirty six years until her husband had died and she had remade herself. They were not entirely like the women who would wear their brothers’ shirts and lower their voices and grow brawny-armed after years of hand-to-mouth work on shipyards; these were richer, of a more elevated class; lucky. One heard stories; artistic women, novelists and high-born bohemians; a scandal either too large or too small to unrudder them as they sailed powerfully on into the distance on a course of their own choosing. For Godfrey, her rebirth had been late enough in life that she found she did not care what anyone else could possibly say about it. She was childless, her parents were dead, her brothers in India, her husband just buried and a portion of his estate suddenly within her hands. She had gone into seclusion, and in seclusion she had realised that the world did not care if she was in or out of it; and so she had chosen to take herself out of it in one way and put herself back into it in another, according to her own wishes and desires. She had gotten the idea (so she had explained to Irene, who listened with interest, thinking about how her own ideas had first formed) in the music halls—why, some of those girls you just could never tell. And the cost and convenience of men’s clothing were much suited to the life of a widow, she had found—particularly a widow who might find herself moving in the more artistic circles of Paris as she managed her dead husband’s properties in Montmartre and La Chapelle, first a creature of ridicule and then, as she weathered all with barely a change of expression, the subject of a brand of wary, mildly repulsed respect.

It was there that she had encountered Irene Adler, three years ago.

“I can’t stand men any more, dear girl,” Godfrey had said to her in that earlier time. “I have been putting up with them for much too long.” They had been in the rooms Godfrey owned and Irene rented, more to please Godfrey than because she liked the rooms themselves. They had retired there, out of the reach of their loud and exciting friends—away from Alexandre Daalmans, who thought Irene was going to marry him; away from Marceline Beauclerc, who could kick the can-can higher than any other woman in France; away from Euphrasie and from Tristram, living in sin, and from Victor and from Félix, merely close friends. The lights had been dimmed—though only inside, for beyond the windows Paris had glittered chaotically, a ransacked dressing table of a city lying in a gorgeous heap at the bottom of the Butte Montmartre. Greasy lamplight and skirt-twitching giggles floating up from the little winding street below; the sound of people, strangers but strangers one always felt fond of, falling through the night, tumbling from café to café. At that moment, in the low light, framed quite frankly by the uncurtained window, Irene had been struggling with a rich emerald bodice in such a way which drew attention to the inward cinch of her waist.

“But you imitate one,” she had smiled, half turning from Godfrey, her hands still performing some complex rite at the small of her back as she attempted to dress. Their relationship had been, then, one of a curious, exuberant friendship. Implications. Artistic admiration. An older woman’s affection for one younger than herself, with no taint of the jealousy that their friends often watched for, idly hoping for a fight to suddenly bloom between the two simply to have a spectacle to gorge themselves upon—rather, when Irene grew bright, Godfrey seemed to glow in sympathy just from watching her. She would go see Irene sing, of course; they all did, but Godfrey went in a singular way, as if her voyage to the opera box were a pilgrimage. She went to listen to Irene sing as some people went to Lourdes. Godfrey was always talking about how she would rejuvenate one of her husband's properties, a money-sink of a dilapidated _théâtre_ , and about how Irene would look upon the boards there once it was made fit for use.

“I don’t imitate any man, Miss Adler. I am entirely a woman. Though...”

“Do help me with this,” Irene Adler had said suddenly, turning and sweeping towards her as if giving into a pull she’d been sternly resisting, presenting Godfrey most plaintively with the mysteries of her bodice. The problem had not been a terribly complex one—they both knew it, and they both knew it to be far from the point. “Though?” Irene had encouraged, keeping the satisfaction away from her voice—men hated to see women satisfied, and she felt in this it was wise to treat Godfrey as she might a man—as Godfrey had patiently taken her unruly clothing in hand and begun to undo and redo according to her own sense of what was right.

“People will see what they want to see.”

Godfrey had never seen Irene in her walking clothes—dressed as a man upon the stage or in photographs, certainly, but there was a startling difference. In those earlier days, made mysterious by memory, Irene had enjoyed pressing Godfrey about Godfrey’s manner of dress and holding up Godfrey’s reasons to her own; she liked to know that she was keeping a secret, especially from one so solid and overpowering as Godfrey Norton.

“Oh, yes,” Irene had murmured. “They will. I wonder, what is you think they see when they look at you?”

“They see Godfrey Norton, I should hope.”

And what a sight Godfrey Norton had been, there in the shadows, with the heat from her hands soaking through layers of clothing to meet Irene’s skin beneath. And what a sight she was now, advancing through her fortieth year, the lines of her face hard with her middle years and with angry desperation. Though Irene would always find her curiously out of place in anywhere but Paris, Godfrey had a furious magnificence to her.

That magnificence remained as Godfrey breathed, “For God’s sake, woman,” shutting the door behind her. The click was a comma in the silence. Irene’s heart jolted, and tried to reach out towards Godfrey across the infinite Arctic plain of the sitting room floor.

“Then you received my message,” Irene said, her expression as detached and blank as the sky.

“I received,” said Godfrey, “your insults. And your accusations. And you confessions, Irene—yes. I received your _damn_ message.”

 

*

Drunken men go everywhere. They stumble through other people’s gardens; they try other people’s doors, believing them to be their own. They stagger through the wrong gates.

A groom was slumped before the white wall of Irene Adler’s house, just sitting up. Occasionally, he gave an indelicate snore. In his sleep, he tried to champ at his pipe, but his pipe had fallen from his hand. Above him, the windows of Miss Adler’s sitting room stretched upwards, church-like; the figure of Godfrey Norton occasionally appeared in them, but of course, the groom did not see; his eyes were closed. He slept. And Holmes listened.

 

*

As Godfrey moved, Irene leaned back at an improbable but attractive angle against the sofa and tried to watch her, as if the sheer force of her movements might block out what she was saying. It was close. She cut a powerful, elegant figure of a man, looming over all that was in the room; her motions were smooth black slashes on the stylish blank paper of the room, pen strokes so violent they risked rupturing their canvas. Irene tried to think as an artist, seeing waves and streaks of colour in place of events in her life—and found it impossible. “Godfrey,” Irene said quietly. Godfrey shook her head.

“You tell me that I am too much like you,” Godfrey laughed painfully. “That that is some kind of obstacle to our being together.”

“Godfrey.”

Godfrey whirled, placing her hands on the bureau, her back presented to Irene; her bullish shoulders strained at the inky black of her suit. “No. You inform me that you have found other entertainments.”

The lone shard of truth caught Irene beneath the ribcage, hooklike, and made her want to fling herself up from the sofa and press herself to Godfrey’s smooth and gorgeous back, sweet and enveloping, denying it with as many ‘darling, never’s she could make tumble from her mouth—there was, after all, nothing else she had written worth denying at all, for nothing else was true. Like a good actress, she restrained herself, and shrugged. Godfrey couldn’t see her, but Irene suspected she would feel it like a ripple in the air; something in how Godfrey’s shoulders trembled for the barest second (that _give_ —) confirmed her suspicions.

“And you tell me that I am...” Godfrey swallowed the sentence and straightened up, turning to face Irene, who was still delicately arranged on the sofa as if painted by a professional. “You say you prefer a higher category of _man_ —” The word ripped the air, and Irene Adler tossed her head upwards and to the side, away, as if Godfrey had slapped her, sneering, “It is true,” too loudly before Godfrey could finish her own sentence.

“—and you think I will believe any of it,” Godfrey said, her voice cracking. "Any of this nonsense you have written to scare me off. As if I were that much of a coward."

The argument smashed, and lay in shards upon the floor. Irene lost her grip on her pose, shoulders slumping in confusion as she turned her head to fix Godfrey with an unscripted stare. "Oh," she said, bewildered.

“You have been trying to frighten me away from you, Irene,” Godfrey Norton said with effort, “since the Théâtre burned down.”

And then the Théâtre had been invoked and Irene was left with no choice in the world but to rise in a creak of whalebone, a rush of skirts; one moment she was on the sofa, and then she was locked tight in Godfrey’s arms. There, Irene suddenly reeled with the all the horrible possibilities of what she might do to Godfrey, and what Godfrey might do to her, and stared helplessly out at the gardens before closing her eyes and pressing her face inwards against her lover. Irene’s cheek was against Godfrey’s warm shoulder; Godfrey’s fingers bled heat into the innermost curve of her waist. “You must have doubted,” Irene said, as if pleading for her to admit to it, voice muffled against Godfrey’s jacket.

“Never,” Godfrey said, and Irene closed her eyes tightly, feeling ill. They did not move.

Outside in the garden, a drunken groom startled awake, sniffed noisily and dragged himself up off the ground, his trousers muddied and his jacket rumpled. He ducked past the windows, though the inhabitants of the sitting room were blind to anything outside of themselves, and he staggered through the gate. After two corners, Holmes gave up on stumbling and strode home, her mind churning like dark water.

Godfrey Norton ( _never has a nice word for nobody—he’s been called to the bar and I’m in line to the throne_ ) was not a man. Here Holmes’ mind juddered and stuck, repeating itself, shouting inside her skull like a broken piece of machinery. “You prefer a higher category of man,” she had said, as if it were not that Irene Adler had encountered men of higher class that was insupportable, but that she had encountered men at all. Godfrey Norton had sounded afraid, as if these men of Irene Adler’s had encroached on some territory she had thought purely her own; not just Adler’s affections, but Norton’s very being.

(— _since the Théâtre burned down_ —how, what, why and when? Was it relevant? The thought was a banner in her brain—)

And Irene Adler...

It was not as if she had not kept up to date with the medical opinion. Those particular blocks of text, however, failed to come properly to mind. They seemed entirely irrelevant. Neither Godfrey Norton nor Irene Adler was recognisable in any sordid German’s attempts to set the infinite strangeness of human desire down in medical language.

Instead, Holmes found herself recalling those men at Cambridge who had preferred the society of other men. It had been difficult not to notice them. It had been difficult not to feel an aborted kinship with them—these other oddities, oblivious to her existence. Holmes had enjoyed watching how they spoke in public, their conversations a curious mix of daring and deceitful, full of sentences which meant nothing but provided a reason to meet each other’s eyes. It was not criminal to talk, after all. There had been Baines, stretched long-limbed over some chair or another, forever frozen that way in memory; Silas, who preferred to let others speak, watching as if not through his wide blue eyes but from behind them, secluded from the world; Richards, now a Member of Parliament. More. She had never exchanged so much as a word with any of their circle, but she had eavesdropped with agonised fascination. Sometimes they had spoken in what was nearly a code, alluding with smiles to things which had happened to their social group far out of the eyes of mere ordinary people. She had marvelled at how they would imbue casual words (“Friday, our usual place”, “Baines’ particular friend”, “dear chap”) with a passionate significance, so that it was no longer the base and tedious dictionary definitions of the word which mattered but the colours they turned as they hung in the air.

This had not been that like that.

This had been an unstoppering, an explosion, a refusal to hint; had it been hinted, Holmes realised, she would have found it easier to understand. Instead it stood there frankly, and she couldn’t seem to fit it in her mind; Godfrey Norton and Irene Adler were lovers.

Irene Adler. Irene _Adler_. Of Irene Adler, Holmes could not even think. The realisation stopped her in her tracks, made her stare upwards at the blank sky. She had not even seen the woman’s face. She had learnt so much and so little about her. Before today, her opinions on Miss Adler had been entirely incorrect; and today, even though she had a fuller picture of her, she had only the scantest pieces of information with which to colour it, even if those pieces of information were vivid enough to distract from their essential slimness. In fact, her original purpose in leaving the house had been nearly forgotten in the wake of all these new discoveries.

It was not that she had thought herself the only person in the world with secrets. It was only that a simple case of a slighted lover had suddenly blossomed into a messy entanglement of men, women and people in-between, with Holmes at the centre—and she did not want to touch it. Or she could not touch it. She could not get involved in anything which might come into contact with her own truths. She would contact the Prince; she would tell him to solve his own problems. She would return his thousand pounds and she would inform him that she had no interest in being his sniffer-dog, not when he himself had so entirely misjudged the nature of the woman causing him so much trouble.

(— _since the Théâtre burned down_ —)

Again, Holmes stopped.

(— _burned_ —)

She turned with a certain mechanical ferocity, darting down one alley and then another, where the white gleam of money turned into greying brick seemingly held upright by weeds, spit and strong will. Smog-burned skeletons of buildings nonetheless scrubbed vividly clean, all in subtly different ways; here, people fiercely refused to live in a slum, no matter what the city told them. Here, a child yelled, “Spare change, mister,” not expecting any answer save to have to quickly dodge the back of a groom’s hand.

“If you can find someone for me!” Holmes called back, instead.

It was like shoving a wedge in the workings of London, she sometimes felt, peeling off these stret urchins and getting them to march in bizarrely regimented order. The boy—no older than ten, gap-toothed and bare-foot, dirtied up to his knees—or at least, most comprehensively dirtied up to his knees, for there was no part of him which was clean—gaped. He did not belong to this area, she could see. Even the houses seemed to draw backwards from him. “Bloody hell," he said, "are you Sherlock Holmes?”

A smile darted across her thin, still-disguised mouth, under the groom’s ugly moustache. It was no great wonder, she consoled herself, feeling in truth rather pleased. She had dropped the walk of a drunk streets earlier in favour of her own sharp stride, and spoken in her own accent. It was hard, she supposed, to believe a man who appeared to be drunk but could walk in a straight line, especially when he seemed to have put his years at Cambridge to use rubbing down horses. “Well-observed.”

“You’ve fallen on hard times, intcha,” the boy said wryly.

“Desperate times,” Sherlock Holmes agreed amicably, “but I have money to spare for any man who can deliver messages—” The boy’s hand shot out, and Holmes’ hand moved quicker, closing over the coin in her palm. “—upon learning that they have, in fact, reached their destination.” Her smile was cold and not unkind.

“You’re impugning my honour, Mr Holmes.”

“So I am. Do you know Wiggins of the Baker Street Irregulars?"

"Course I do."

"Excellent. Then tell him to bring the usual gang to Briony Lodge at five o'clock, for a brawl and a fire. Say exactly that. Here; an advance. I don’t expect you to work for no guarantees. There’ll be more later if you come by—”

“221B Baker Street,” the boy chorused, “I know.”

He did not even blink; he just gave a fierce sort of grin, and set off in a scurrying, stumbling run which carried him out of view with almost unsettling speed, and vanished into the shapes and shadows of London. Holmes stood and watched him go. _Sherlock Holmes says this_. She sometimes had to try very hard to remember her own audacity; and sometimes it would hit her, hard, as she stood in the street; that what she was did would get her branded sick, criminal, would lose her the respect of a city. A country. And that she would not stop. Her lips trembled upwards at one corner, but she forced down the smile—she thought it was a smile, though grimaces could now and then take her by surprise—and made herself walk.

Godfrey Norton. Irene Adler. And the Prince of Wales. Holmes turned familiar corners without realising it, her movements guided by the texture of the terrain beneath her feet and the scents of London; with her mind disconnected from her limbs, her body had become one of the city’s instruments. The door to 221B Baker Street shuddered open when she leant on it.

Watson was there. So said the carpet.

Of course, she realised, her bandages limiting her slow exhalation; she had told him to call upon her at three in the afternoon. She shook her head. The world came into focus. The thought had confused her at first; for a moment, she had wondered why she was surprised; but it hardly mattered when there were seventeen steps to take two at a time and a sharp nod to fire in Watson’s direction. He did not look at all perturbed by her disguise.

She was tired, she found with some surprise. Tired and feeling scattered. Her brain felt strangled and parched, and she was irritated at herself for chasing up pointless leads, for being closer to the truth but not closer to her objective—that the truth itself, apparently, was _not_ her objective. Primarily, though, what she felt was a stretching blankness. An inability to properly respond to the events of the day. It was a relief to take the drunken groom off, washing clean her face as she stood in bandages and undone, muddied trousers, water splashing off her shaking hands. She closed her eyes, and shook her head to try to pull herself out of her own mind; Watson would come to suspect something if she showed anything less than her usual alacrity in dressing.

“Are you quite well?” Watson called through the door, though Holmes was pleased to note that it was a formality. She closed her eyes, and straightened up.

“Splendid, dear chap,” she said, springing into the living room, tweed-suited and respectable once more. Watson smiled, and Holmes’ long body dropped into her armchair. Watson looked at his companion expectantly—and then blinked, for Holmes was slowly beginning to shake with silent laughter.

Irene Adler—with Godfrey Norton—and the Prince of Wales, gloriously oblivious. Holmes had to muffle a howl of mirth, laughter racking her helplessly, so that Watson could do nothing but join in, despite not knowing—not knowing!—what she was laughing about, not knowing anything about why she would laugh at it—Holmes groaned, clutched her chest and wiped her eyes, trying to rub her face into some sort of composure. “Watson,” she said helplessly, “Watson, she is—” A remnant of her laughing fit jerked in her chest and made her cackle airlessly, head bowed with her elbow on her knee and her forehead resting on her hand. Her other hand quested shakily inside her jacket for her cigarette case before giving up, falling to the arm of her chair. She had laughed herself beyond breath, and now laughed herself into choking.

“She is what, Holmes?” Watson pleaded, chuckling with a bemused sort of patience. Holmes raised her head, knowing that her face was as red as ever the grooms was, and burst out in a harsher laughter to know that he could never know. She took a breath, and thought of Adler and Norton. _You must have doubted; never._

It was a case of having to impart the meaning without any of the details. It was more translation than deception. “Married, Watson,” she said dizzily, a story already piecing itself together in her mind; a story with all the sense of the truth. “I would say that she is quite firmly married.”

“Married!”

“Indeed.”

“To whom?”

“To a man whom I shall describe in the fullest sense once I may breathe without interruption.”

“Good God. And the picture?”

“The picture, yes. I have my ideas on how it may be recovered...” She would not leave the case. She had decided as much on the street, and set her plans in motion almost in the same motion. She _could_ not leave the case. She was suddenly connected to them, to Irene Adler and Godfrey Norton. Her objective here was not meant to be the discovery of the truth—indeed the Prince had gone out of his way to make Holmes focus on nothing more than the declawing of Irene Adler—but Holmes saw no reason why she might not widen her purview slightly.

Trying to slow her breaths, she stared at Watson. She could hardly make him consider the truth of the matter. He would only get the scent of it, and follow it—to Holmes herself. The thought made her stomach tumble, the world seeming to slip beyond her grasp for a second; she gave a breath of sick laughter. She inhaled deeply, like she was afraid of a secret escaping her lungs unbidden.

“This evening, in fact, we will locate that picture. But first, I will tell you the facts of what happened this morning...”

    That the Prince of Wales was surely out of danger.  
    That Irene Adler married a man, and that that man’s name was Godfrey Norton.

And one truth:

    That Sherlock Holmes possessed a plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU for reading and CONGRATULATIONS, that was a lot of rambling you just got through! More of it now, of a 'please don't let this be treason' variety.
> 
>  **"A Royal vistor"** — Bohemia was at this point part of Austria-Hungary, and did not have its own monarch. The 'King of Bohemia' is a thin cover (and possibly a wry nod to the other meaning of 'bohemian'? we will never know). The royal Holmes is here assisting is, as he is later named, the Prince of Wales, who was then Prince Albert Edward, and would become more famous as King Edward VII. (He was 'Bertie' to his mates). Obviously this account is absurdly fictionalised and not much to do with Bertie at all, though he is suspected to have been ACD's inspiration for the King of Bohemia.
> 
>  **"Lady Greville"** — Poor Lady Greville, later Countess of Warwick, really was Bertie's lover and really did write a letter to another married man which caused something of a wacky races chase through Victorian high society when he held onto it after showing it to his family and friends. ...Or not, but, you know, I like the image. There is absolutely no evidence Sherlock Holmes was ever consulted in the case. I know it's saddening. Relatedly, though, Holmes here probably has some second-hand experience with Bertie before she actually meets him, because he took the Countess' side most ardently.
> 
>  **"Mordaunt divorce case"** — Exactly what it says on the tin.
> 
>  **"sordid German"** — Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, who published [Psychopathia Sexualis](http://archive.org/stream/psychopathiasexu00krafuoft#page/n9/mode/2up) in 1886. The work was a pretty thorough description of 'disordered' sexuality, although of course female sexuality was presented as passive, so it was mostly centred upon male 'disordered' desire. However, it does have a rather interesting, saddening and light-shedding section on queer women, and it displays Victorian thinking on sexuality versus gender expression rather clearly.


	2. "Men should have petticoats, poor things."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on French: there is a tiny bit in this chapter! Most should be fairly understandable from context, and nothing is particularly plot-heavy. I'll throw in translations at the end. A second note on French: I have possibly made mistakes. If you notice any, I would welcome corrections.
> 
> Enjoy.

**Montmartre, Paris, 1887**

It was raining that night, and from outside there would every so often come a cry as if someone were desperately excited by the weather. Women shrieked and their beaux covered them up with their coats, spreading an umbrella for them as they all went laughing and splashing across the bright cobbles. By this hour everyone outside was either drunk enough or disreputable enough to care very little for ruined skirt hems or muddied boots.

In a room high up above the street, Irene Adler and Godfrey Norton whispered against the staccato of the rain, and watched it splash on the sliver of window visible between the plain curtains. The room was in an indigo darkness, rain scattering watery shadows where it could, giving the impression of the little bedroom being at the bottom of the sea. "I should name it Le Théâtre Américain," Godfrey said drowsily into the back of Irene's neck, her voice warm-tickling her nape.

"For Heaven's sake, Godfrey," Irene sighed, mouth smile-shaped against the cool cotton expanse of the pillow. "In Paris? They would come with torches.” Godfrey’s hand was on the jut of Irene’s hipbone; Irene slipped her fingers into the spaces between Godfrey’s. Their bodies fitted together well; they were crescents in the sheets, curled around each other like one set of speech marks. “You shan't name it tonight."

"I shall," Godfrey groaned, nuzzling against Irene’s shoulder, turning her head to get Irene’s hair out of her mouth and then sighing against her skin. "This is a good hour for it. Don't you think?"

"It is a good hour to go directly to sleep," Irene said, affecting sternness, " _Mrs Norton_. After such strenuous activity—"

"Le Théâtre d'Irène," Godfrey said, into Irene's shoulder this time, and Irene fell still and silent.

"No," she said, a little subduedly. "No, not unless you plan to give bookings to nobody but me. No other performer worth their salt would deign to set foot in it."

"Perhaps I find the idea attractive," Godfrey said. Irene carefully did not sigh.

The Théâtre—unnamed as it was—was now Godfrey's main topic of conversation. It would be, she said, strictly for opera and for tragedy. She was working on it with Alexandre Dalmaans, a sculptor and architect as brilliant as he was inexperienced, who lusted after Irene with complete blindness to Godfrey’s relations with her. Irene would laugh fondly at poor Alexandre in the hope that Godfrey might join her. Godfrey would instead simply describe the coming theatre in raptures from the space in the wings which the performers would be afforded, to the electric lighting and fabulously modern design, to the rich red velvet seats, to the modelling of the ceiling which would, it sounded to Irene, be whipped like cream, hanging perpetually frozen over the performers. It wouldn’t seat many—but it would seat as many as it could, and in truth, its relatively small size would make it more interesting, more exclusive, or so Godfrey said.

Irene was at the centre of all these fantasies. Godfrey would finish them all with _and you would shine there, my girl_ —and Irene would swallow the sense that Godfrey, in her devoted and unselfish way, was describing a gilded cage.

"Le Théâtre de l'Aigle d'Or," Godfrey said suddenly. "The Golden Eagle. You are an American, and your surname means—"

"One says 'un aigle royal' for a golden eagle," Irene snapped, "for heaven's sake."

The rain continued to batter at the windows in the ensuing silence. Out on the street—now a river—a little explosion of loud young courtesans blew out into the rain. They were invisible, but their voices clamoured. One plaintive wail gusted higher than the rest, buffeted by the wind and the rain; _ma robe est abîmée_! Their high-pitched cheerfulness seemed garishly inappropriate and Irene wished they’d go—but when their splashes and shrieks finally receded down the street and faded into nothing, the quiet was almost unbearable. Against her throat, Godfrey’s breaths were slow, and Irene felt like each one was laden with a pointed hurt.

"Call it Le Théâtre d'Or," Irene said, running her thumb over the ridge of Godfrey’s knuckles in an unspoken apology she did not much want to give.

 

**London, 1889  
21st March**

The punch was bloody and visceral. The man who took it to his jaw fell against the body of Irene Adler’s neat little landau and sent it rocking on its wheels, as Irene Adler herself clutched for balance, half in and half out of the carriage. She hissed in her breath, gloved hand gripping tight at the doorway.

And that was how the brawl started.

It was as if the street had possessed a violence simmering under the calm, suburban surface, just waiting for the first blow to crack the veneer so that the fight could bubble up like blood from a split lip. Irene didn’t follow how it happened, but it did happen; one man shoved another, somebody’s fist connected brutally with somebody else’s jaw, a stick whirled through the air and caught a man’s arm with a crack that made her nearly retch and then she was forcing her way down her carriage steps with her forearm held up against any blows, trying to push through the struggling knot—

“Madam!” she heard someone cry, and for a moment she had not the slightest idea that it might be directed at her. Prompted by some intuition, however, and made half blind by a dazedness which was more shock than fear, she turned, and there was a clergyman, elderly and ridiculously frail next to the brawnier types with their sticks and fists, who nonetheless reached out a hand to usher her to safety.

She reached out—saw the man beside him raise his stick and saw the horrible arc in which it would fall in the same instant. The distance seemed impossibly far, the world too large. She cried, “ _Watch_ ,” or she meant to—she was not in truth quite sure what she shouted, if she shouted anything at all. The clergyman was already falling to the ground, and someone else’s hands were on her arms. For just two or three quiet and soft seconds, Irene Adler allowed herself to drift.

She had been here before, she thought, stumbling onwards; that was why she was not so much afraid as sickeningly surprised. It was only that she had never planned to be anywhere so _rough_ , not now—

"Oh, get inside, ma'am," Beth was begging her—it had been Beth’s hands who had grabbed her, Irene realised belatedly, and Beth who had pulled her from the fight and up the steps to the house, where they were now framed by the light of the open door. The world came into focus. Irene let out a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding, straightening shakily and turning back to face the remnants of the fight. Her hands clasped anxiously at Beth's as she stared at the scene.

There was blood on the cobbles. 

John, Irene’s coachman, was trying to marshal the panicked horses into calm; whinnies and whispers filled the air, which seemed to be cooling down, the flash of frenzied violence gone as soon as it had come. Men were running away, boots thudding on the pavement as they fled, afraid of being charged with murder. No one made much move to stop them. Their footsteps faded. The gathered, hesitant crowd kept starting forwards nervously before uncertainty yanked them back from the grisly centrepiece of the scene, a bloody mess whom no one wanted to touch; the elderly clergyman who had tried to protect her. 

He lay prone, blood striped over the left side of his face, gathering in the wrinkles on his brow. A single red drop streaked suddenly down the side of his nose, dropped off the end. His shoulder shook; he tried to raise himself up in a pathetic jerking movement, then fell back and was still. A woman in the crowd turned away to the shoulder of her companion, and another called for a doctor to be found and was ignored. 

They had been there, Irene realised. They had all of them seen, and none of them done anything. She stared out at them. Her lips twisted; the world rocked, and Beth gripped tighter to her. She would shame them, she thought wildly, that hated and disreputable as she might be—

(and here a firmer clutch at Beth’s fingers, another wave of dizziness)

—that hated and disreputable as she _was not anymore_ she was at least not heartless. The scene clattered into reality, and Irene was suddenly inside her own body again, much more firmly than she had been before. She drew herself up. “Is the poor gentleman very much hurt?” she called. Her voice rang like a bell. 

Her lips thinned as a woman trembling in elegant lace and velvet insisted hysterically that he was dead. Her companion hushed her with assurances that he was not dead yet. On the pavement, the man groaned faintly. Once more, it took two tries for her to speak; the first she stumbled at, with a wash of sudden stage fright, afraid to make a sound in case they would not pay attention to her—how stupid. That, too, was another thing of the past she hadn’t intended to meet again. With great defiance, Irene Adler threw back her shoulders and filled her lungs. "Won't you bring him in?” she demanded, interrupting the general hubbub. Thank God; they stilled, and looked up at her. “I insist. Bring him to the living room, please, there is a sofa he may lie upon."

Beth hissed in her ear, “Miss Adler, are you—”

"Quite sure, yes. And quite alright. Entirely with thanks to you," she said, in sudden low earnest, squeezing again at Beth's hands and then dropping them to lead the sudden procession into her sitting room. For some reason, everyone who had been out on the street seemed to take it as an invitation—over ten people suddenly crowded into the room; the woman in the lace, her foppish husband, the loungers and the onlookers and everyone else. Irene marshalled her temper and turned her anger into imperious calm, though she wondered, coolly, from behind her own emotions, how it was that they didn’t see how much she suddenly hated them. "Here. Lie him here."

They laid him there. He groaned quietly as he was manhandled onto the cushions. Irene felt herself being taken over by her own role, heard herself give calm instructions as she peeled off maids and members of the public and assigned to them their duties. “You, sir, please call a doctor; Emily, sit with the gentleman, keep him calm; Beth, fetch water, some to drink and some to clean the wound; Lucy, bandages, smelling salts...”

She seemed to fade out of her own sitting room, becoming just a series of instructions, automatically and effectively imposing order. Her mind was whirling in another location entirely, trying to join up the distinct, brutal moments which had led to this. The fight had started when a man had rushed forward to open her carriage door, only to be elbowed away by another with similar intentions. It seemed ridiculous. Irene’s bewildered fury rolled in her stomach, not touching her calm, commanding surface, as she looked back at the man who shivered and groaned upon her sofa, his eyes flickering hazily open.

She was still talking, she noted, hearing her voice as if from a distance. “...madam—no? Very well, then—you, sir, alert the police, and if all the rest of you would please _leave_...” She had somehow kept talking through her own dull anger, but now, at the protests that no, this young lady was a nurse, and this gentleman part way through his surgical training, she rose up and added, “That is wonderful, and I’m sure the police shall be eager to hear your individual accounts of the attempted murder.” The silence rang out. “Though it may take some time—Lucy, if you would perhaps tell the cook to produce something hot to drink and a plate of sandwiches, for I imagine we shall not get to bed before midnight, any of us, if such an investigation is to gather any momentum...”

The room shortly emptied. Irene didn’t wait for them all to leave to sink to the floor beside the sofa, joining white-faced Beth beside the poor, gasping man. Wordlessly, she took the basin of water from the other woman, wetting a cloth and saying, in a smooth, low tone borrowed (she did not realise it at the time) from her mother; “There now, sir...”

Later, she would wonder how the timing did not worry her, but she supposed the stress of the past moments had confused her. Before she could lean in to wipe away the blood, the man gave a choking shudder and clawed for air, and Irene had to drop her plans of cleaning the wound to cry, “Beth, the window!” She slammed the basin down on the floor and ignored the water which soaked her skirts and sleeve, reaching for the clergyman. “Sir, hush, please; breathe _slowly_ —”

Smoke billowed, grey and choking. Irene caught a great lungful of it, searing her lungs. Beth screamed and ran from the room, and from outside there came the cry:

“Fire!”

(The first breath of burning suggested nothing but a lamp left to smoke—Irene, unused to electric lights, occasionally forgot that the entire theatre was electrified. She sighed in annoyance, committed herself to the hard work of standing up in her complicated bustle and array of skirts—“I shall be back directly; forgive me, but if I were to burn the place down Godfrey would never forgive me,”—but Marceline had already sprung to her feet, insisting she would look after it. Irene watched her go, smiling faintly. The last thing she heard Marceline say, ever, was a mocking, “You and she! You are even faithful when you betray her. You even make me feel a little in love with her.”

The scream which came seconds later didn't count.)

Irene clawed her way to the mantelpiece, reaching for the bell-pull beside it; she must have done, though later she would have no memory of it, just a desperate whirl of images; the man on her sofa, the smoke, her walls, her hands, her secrets.

(“Run!”

The curtains had caught fire—caught it like a feverish, wasting disease. The sound they made as they went up was like that of a whooping cough, except truthfully it was not quite that; it was something she would never be able to truthfully compare with anything—a roar, a snarl, a sob, and suddenly they were just a sheet of flame in front of her. This wasn’t smoke. There was no possible way that this greyness could be smoke. It was too thick, replacing the air, forcing its way down her throat and into her eyes. It was like trying to breathe in hot water. The air was turned to thick, bubbling liquid. Everything was grey; orange; sweat made her skin feel oily.

“Marceline! Marceline!”

She was already lost.)

Her hands were desperate on the sliding panel; needed, need to, had to, to stick to the _plan_ , oh God was there no _mercy_ —

(The theatre on fire was a world of its own. The blaze made dark corridors, darker rooms—and how could fire be dark? The smoke—the cinders—the black ash—Irene didn’t know, until she realised amidst animal fear that her vision was grey-browning and howled against her own lack of oxygen, pushing herself desperately on and on and on. She was coughing. Retching. The word “Marceline” wouldn’t come out of her mouth again no matter how much she tried to force it. Her skin was mapped with tiny burns. Her cries of _au secours_ didn’t even make it past the smoke clogging her throat.)

—there wasn’t enough smoke.

“It is a false alarm,” the man on the sofa croaked.

There were letters in her hands, and one cabinet photograph. Materials which to rock a nation with scandal. The tools of the downfall of a prince—of a selfish and uncaring man. Valuable, dangerous items, which trembled as her hands shook with an anger which had suddenly asserted itself, though she could not understand what she had to be angry about. Her rational mind seemed to be moving through molasses.

There wasn’t enough smoke.

The realisation crashed like a wave. Soaked her, left her gasping. Irene shoved her papers and her photograph back into the hidden safe, snapping the sliding panel closed, and whirled to stare—at the smoke rocket and then at Sherlock Holmes, now somehow entirely obvious in the disguise of a simple Non-Conformist clergyman, red paint a poor substitute for blood. Their eyes met. Irene Adler’s fists clenched, and she snatched up her skirts to flee from the room, banging the door behind her.

Her coachman John was running up the corridor. Irene snatched his arm, hissed, “Do not let him touch the bell-pull!” and shoved him into the sitting room before she flew through her house, heaving her skirts away from her feet until Beth nearly collided with her upon the stairs. “Beth—”

“Miss Adler—”

“Fetch my—”

Beth was already pushing Irene’s walking clothes into her hands. Irene nearly kissed her, but Beth was already pushing her up the stairs and into the dressing room. Her hands yanked frantically at the fastenings of Irene’s dress, tugging off buttons with a machine-like focus; Irene helped, with an actress’ skill at quickly undressing, before giving a curse and almost throwing herself across the room to her dressing table. There, in a jewel box, was a knife, which Beth took from her hand. Even as she lined up the knife with the strings of Irene’s corset, she said, “Are you—”

“I’m always sure,” Irene said, unclasping the harness of her bustle and seeking out the buttons of her petticoats. “Time is of the essence.”

There was a snarl of ripping fabric, and a breath of fresh air into her freed lungs. Her corset and chemise came off at once, dropping ruined to the floor in puddles of cream and white. She didn’t wince. Irene Adler never felt any grief for a role discarded; she simply moved, shifted, became other than herself and then molded herself into becoming what she wanted to be; acted. Was. She slipped between selves with a cool deftness, designing herself.

Just as Sherlock Holmes departed, still in the disguise of an injured clergyman, Irene Adler came down the stairs, her hair under her hat, and her smart man's suit hidden under her smart ulster. She slipped out of the back door to avoid the crowd still gathered around the front, and breathed a sigh of relief in the cold early darkness. The breath that crystallised before her was not at all like the smoke she had vomited out years ago while slumped on cold Parisian cobbles, her cheek in the mud, skin peppered with burns. She considered this needlessly, and then she tucked her head down and set off in pursuit.

*

“And when will you call upon her?” Watson asked, as they made their way through the darkening city. Holmes was still dressed like a clergyman but walked like Holmes. A trace of red paint she had not properly wiped away graced her cheekbone, and another drop was caught on one single lower eyelash. Watson’s handkerchief (“Regrettably, the minister left without—” “Take mine, Holmes.”) was ruined, and had been dropped in the street. Watson’s arm was through Holmes’.

“At eight in the morning. She will not be up, so that we shall have a clear field,” Holmes said, astounded at her own complete lack of satisfaction in what she had just done. She felt like taking her own mind by the shoulders and shaking it. She had answered the required question, after all. She had been correct. But the fact left her cold.

It was not that she was unhappy, precisely, and nor was she guilty. It was simply that the incident had revealed nothing of worth. Oh, she knew where the photograph was, and the incriminating letters. All she felt, though, was a vague and distant revulsion—with all the petty squabbles which constituted humanity, and with herself, both for getting involved and, conversely, for thinking them petty and mildly disgusting when surely one should try to find these things poignant—for one’s sanity, if not one’s morality. The case held nothing. No puzzles, merely fear and force. It was merely collection of strange and isolated people bound together and balanced by fears which pulled them in opposing directions—and Holmes herself could hardly avoid seeing how she fitted into the same category. It didn’t lessen her disdain so much as further sour it. She sneered at herself in the privacy of her own mind, but all she said aloud was, “I must wire to the Prince without delay.”

To Holmes’ vastly mechanical mind, it was entirely clear what Irene Adler wanted revenge for. In 1884 she had been a prima donna in Warsaw, a slightly scandalous but young and bright-burning star ready to take a bite out of the lustres of the world. Then the Prince had met her. By 1885 she had been in Paris, notorious, dramatically disgraced but magnificently famous—for everything but her voice. Men were always ruining women; Irene Adler had just been lucky enough to drag herself up into a position from which she might retaliate.

Paris. The Théâtre which burned down must have done so while Miss Adler had been living in Paris. The stunt with the smoke rocket had at least proven to Holmes that Irene had not just been an observer to the inferno. From the way she had rushed to her feet and staggered to the mantelpiece, a familiar horror twisting her features and a gasp of “is there no _mercy_ ” escaping her throat, she had encountered the flames head-on.

These facts clicked closer, closer, on the rails of Holmes’ mind, and Holmes could feel them approaching their proper destination, could hear a whistle in the distance of a theory about to emerge from tunnel-blackness, when, “Are you quite alright?” Watson inquired.

Holmes blinked, realigning herself with the world around her. “Of course. As I said, it was red paint, and those gentlemen merely actors.”

“And we were not hurting her,” Watson said. “Merely preventing her from hurting another.”

Holmes stopped, making Watson stop too. The gaslight encircled them greasily, and Holmes took him in; slightly shorter than her, broader too, and looking quite calmly into her eyes, unafraid and unembarrassed, no matter how hard she stared at him.

“Once again, you take me for a better man than I am.”

“Then pray do not enlighten me as to the truth of your character.”

“It is impossible to enlighten you, Watson,” Holmes said, quite softly. Before he could respond, she added, “Home.” She released his arm to stride off into the smears of orange gaslight which interrupted the evening.

She was surprised when he followed. She had meant—each to their own homes. But he strode to catch up with her, gave her a calm nod, and for a strange moment of simplicity they both seemed to exist in the exactly same world. It was like they were bachelors together again. It was like it didn’t matter that she had secrets. Holmes’ lips flickered.

She searched for the key in the cleric’s pockets as they dawdled upon the doorstep, and Watson said thoughtfully, “You know, I am nearly sure that yesterday I spotted in the sitting room, either discarded, badly-hidden or forgotten, a rather dusty bottle of brandy which I distinctly recall you being rewarded with in _1886_ , Holmes.”

“Oh, you know I forget these gifts, Watson...of course, we might open it, if that is what you are hinting at, in celebration of our success—” 

In that moment, she found the key, secreted in some inner pocket of the clergyman’s she had thrown it into on a whim, and felt the air change subtly, as if a gaslight had dimmed or brightened. From the ever-moving street, somebody said, in a low and pleasant voice, “Good-night, Mr Holmes.”

Mr Holmes stared down the dimly-lit street, the key in her hand stopped halfway to the lock. “I’ve heard that voice before,” she said. “Now I wonder who the deuce that might have been.”

“One of your Irregulars?”

“No, Watson, they are all younger, and not half so smartly dressed—get in,” she said suddenly. “Find the brandy for yourself. And for me, if you will, find my file on Irene Adler, while I hunt down my records of Parisian theatrical news in the last five years.”

“I thought you had just about solved the case, Holmes?”

“I have,” Holmes said decisively, “and now it is time to solve the next. The problem, Watson, of the burned theatre—there! See what your stories have done! I think in titles now!” Watson was chased up the stairs by Holmes’ sudden urgency, and made his way immediately to where Holmes had left the records of Irene Adler—spread out upon the desk. She gazed up from countless photographs and was outlined in any number of reviews.

“What exactly is it you are trying to find out?”

“Do you recall, in recent years, any news of a theatre in Paris being burned down, likely with a woman inside it who mercifully escaped with her life?”

“Why, no.”

“That is it, Watson.” Holmes was moving with alarming speed through files and book-ends, hurling a treatise on Parisian architects to the floor and firing one collection of newspaper clippings on Impressionist art exhibitionists over her shoulder; the bindings came apart, and the clippings flew across the floor in a messy spill of newsprint. “That is it entirely. _Neither do I_.”

“And this means what?”

“I have no idea, only that I should have heard of it. Yesterday, Watson, I heard Mr Godfrey Norton referring to an incident which put some strain on his relationship with Miss Adler—a very specific _théâtre_ which burned down. When you threw that smoke rocket, mademoiselle reacted as if she had heard the hounds of hell yapping at her doors. She was thrown quite out of herself. I cannot shake the suspicion that Miss Adler— _the Adler_ , who was then so famous—was nearly burned to death in recent years, and that somehow no one heard of it. Does that not strike you as strange?” She rocked on the balls of her feet, tugged her 1885 to 1887 files free and threw them on the sofa, kneeling to push her fingers through them. “Keep reading about Miss Adler. Read out anything which seems pertinent. I have thought it over before, but some extra stimulation, some cross-reference might aid my research on her...”

“Well, she was born in—it gives five different possible birth places, Holmes, she seems to pick and choose—it may be New Orleans, or New Jersey, or Havana, or Spain, and she has hinted once or twice at—”

“France.”

“Indeed. Very few records of any early life; she seems to have been born, as we know her, at the Academy of Music in New York—”

“Oh, do cut out the poetry, Watson.”

“This is interesting; she was quite the rags to riches story. Apparently she was discovered when singing at a French Ball at the Academy—not as an invited musician, but as a guest. She volunteered to do a turn and quite stunned every other ball-goer. The reviews are...breathless. Let’s see...Irene Adler is not the only name she has claimed—she has been Irenka, and Irène Dubois, and once claimed some...endless Spanish name as her birthright—”

“Maria de la Luz Irene Ruiz Los Fiertes. Carry on. Carry on.” Holmes was still rifling through 1886 in Paris, shoving aside sheafs of paper on the scandalous revue at the _Folies Bergère_ and the re-election of Jules Grévy—then to 1887, barking a derisive laugh at artists bemoaning how the plans to build the Tour Eiffel slighted French taste. 1886, discarded, fell off the sofa in a thump and fanned out on on the floor, where Holmes ignored it.

“She was prima donna in Warsaw, and judging by the reviews—a storm of success. And then she...it is not mentioned here of course, but then she met the prince. And indeed, shortly after, she left, surfacing again in Paris.” Watson paused. “I suppose their meeting could not have been the reason for her move?”

“You do not suppose anything. You know it must have been so. Continue. Paris is what we need.”

“Paris. Well, it seems she blossomed in Paris. The earlier reports are all scant, focusing on her looks and her voice, and occasionally her surprising beginnings in New York, but these are...colourful. She was linked to a friend of the President’s, attracted remarkable crowds, but in her personal life mostly seems to have stuck within a very bohemian artistic circle.”

“Montmartre.”

“Quite so. She modelled for certain of the artists there.”

“I can imagine she did. Aha! Data.”

“What is it?”

Holmes held up a piece of paper rather triumphantly, still leafing through newsprint with her other hand. “The Prince of Wales,” she said. “He paid a visit to Paris early last year. February 1888.”

“And how does this aid our location of the theatre?”

“It allows us to put two—three, including Mr Norton—of our principal players in this little drama in the same setting,” Holmes crowed. “In fact, tell me what Miss Adler was doing in February 1888, for I wager...”

“It was the year she retired,” they said in tandem, and looked up at each other to exchange lit up eyes and pleased, sharp smiles. “In fact, for some two months she vanished completely. There were rumours of her death in early April. If she was indeed caught in a fire, perhaps her nerves took a fright from it and she retired to rest, which would place the fire around February,” Watson continued eagerly, scanning the pages before him before stopping, deflating. “But you cannot be thinking of linking the Prince’s visit with...?”

In Holmes’ mind, her lost train of thought roared into view and crunched delicate bones in its path. She blinked, returning to her body, rather surprised to find she hadn’t staggered, and stared at her newspaper cuttings, her pieces of research, her scrawled down gossip. 

Ah.

“I need my Parisian newspapers.” To go through all of them for the entire period in which Irene Adler had been resident in Paris would have been ludicrous, but now she bounded across the room, opening a drawer and heaving them out. They exhaled dust and the smell of mildew. The clergyman’s wig had been left half way across the room, joining his clerical collar; her own short hair, sticky with hair oil and sweat, stuck upwards or clung to the sharp edges of her face. “1888...the latter half of February...Watson, pray you come help me with this, I have heard enough of Irene Adler’s general life story. Now we must specialise. Search for a theatre and a fire.”

Watson dropped to his knees on the carpet, taking an old newspaper and lying it out on the floor, frowning down at the text. On all fours Holmes scanned three at once, a factory line of research. The room was snowed with paper. “There might have been a royal visit, but one cannot credit the two of them being in the same city as any reasonable evidence for their interaction,” Watson was still insisting. “If the Prince somehow caused Miss Adler to flee Warsaw, surely he would not then come to visit her, even three or four years later?” Watson pointed out.

“Who knows what love might make men do. Women, too. They are not exempt.”

“I can hardly imagine her wanting to see him.”

“Quite true. And having seen her in action, I cannot imagine her doing anything which she might not want to do,” Holmes agreed. “Nonetheless, Watson—there is something about the entire case which smells wrong, do you not find?”

“I—”

“Do you believe that the Prince of Wales’ reputation would be rocked by _another_ dalliance with a celebrated beauty of lower social standing than he? Consider Miss Langtry.”

“No,” Watson admitted, “no, I do not think it can be anything so simple as the mere existence of a relationship.”

“With what, then, is she really threatening him?”

“I cannot say. Something he is loath to trust anyone with, even you. ...Holmes. Here. A theatre which burned down on the 20th February. The proprietor is named as a G Norton—Miss Adler’s husband. Mrs Norton’s husband, even. It was called Le Théâtre d’Or,” Watson said, putting his index finger down upon the newsprint. “And a woman perished in the blaze...”

Holmes stared at the article, reading it upside down. It was short, brief and unromantic; a small theatre, not yet officially opened, had been entirely destroyed by flames. The body of a woman had been retrieved; she was unidentified. The gendarmes were looking into the matter, and invited anybody with any information to come forward. Holmes knew they had given up long ago. She read it again, struck by the strangest sensation of seeing some glimpse of Irene Adler through a screen—a smoky haze—of history. Somewhere behind the grimy, prosaic bars of text, she smiled, disclosing none of her secrets. Holmes felt suddenly as if she were not in pursuit, but rather being led.

“Oh, yes,” she said quietly. Watson said something which did not even touch her ears. “Yes, that is her.” 

_Good-night, Mr Holmes_. Yes: Holmes had known that voice.

Slowly, she unfolded herself from the floor. “You never found the brandy you were so looking forward to, Watson.”

“No, I—”

“It is on the shelf above my correspondence from 1882, next to my spare rosin. Enjoy it to its fullest while I am out. Please—make yourself at home,” she added absently, not realising that she had addressed Watson as she might a visitor. She pushed back her hair and reached for her own coat and hat, putting them on over the shabbier clothes of the clergyman. Outside, a pale mist of rain had begun to not fall so much as hang in the air.

Sherlock Holmes closed the front door behind her and breathed in slowly. She stared down the street to where it faded into dark anonymity. Somewhere, Irene Adler was waiting to be found.

Why else would she say a word, having so successfully disguised herself? Irene Adler wasn’t being chased; Irene Adler had been both fisherman and bait, gotten her hook well caught in Holmes’ brain, and now she was yanking, reeling in her catch. Holmes knew it. And now that she knew it, she decided, she could allow it to happen, as long as she was aware of the trap she was walking into.

She fell into the general movement of the street, allowing herself to be swept along in the direction Irene Adler had gone. The cold bit at her jaw and nose, and she considered the options lying out in front of her. Where would Irene Adler go? Nowhere dangerous or drastically important, if she felt able to alert Holmes to her presence, unless it had been a very serious misjudgement.

What destination might require her to disguise herself as a man?

In particular, why might _Irene Adler_ —

Ah. Of course. For other women.

In that case, Holmes thought philosophically and _carefully_ , so as to avoid thinking anything else—in that case, she needed to turn _this_ way, and then _that_ way...

She surged around a corner, pushing her hat lower and gripping her stick tighter, walking briskly until the brick became slightly shabbier and the streets mugged with a warm muttering shiftiness. She walked by women with goosebumps prickling on their bare arms, who raised their eyebrows at her and smiled proud and colourful smiles and who—didn’t know. 

Holmes clamped down on the sudden flare of dizzying fear. She’d been thinking too much about it lately. She suspected it was Irene Adler’s fault. Holmes’ secrets survived because the truth was stranger than the fiction she so readily sold. Irene Adler and Godfrey Norton existed in a world in which that was not necessarily true. Their very existence picked at old wounds. They made her feel precarious. She felt the weight of her secrets on her tongue, and felt a cloying black horror at how easy it would be to say _I am a woman_ or at least _I am not a man_. One single sentence and she could destroy her own life. It was heady. It was so hideous that it was tempting. She could ruin it all.

She was spiralling into hypothesis again.

Beneath the brim of her tall top hat, Holmes narrowed her eyes and stalked onwards as if trying to outrun her own thoughts. She slammed certain mental doors, locked them, gave them a kick for good measure. She was safe; it was simply a matter of keeping her distance, firstly so that people did not discover who she was and wasn’t, and secondly so that she did not care enough about them to mind that they were incorrect about her. She took a deep breath and dragged the unsteady, cliff-edge feeling of fragility down into her lungs along with a decent amount of evening smog and the smell of horse manure and cheap tobacco. If it was to torment her, it could do so later. For now, she had a case, and for the first time, it felt like a case should. She quickened her pace further, striding over the straw which littered the cobbles.

 _Good-night, Mr Holmes_.

Two public houses in one day, Holmes thought. She was getting to be quite the connoisseur.

The Good Knight was a different world to the street. The moment Holmes stepped inside, the warm smell of beer and sticky humanity enveloped her. Men were sprawled in chairs, raising glasses, creating a low hubbub of noise; most of them were young, which she wasn’t at all surprised to see. The establishment had a reputation for catering to younger gentlemen looking for an idealised experience of the low life which wouldn’t dirty their gloves—and for supplying girls to those who wanted them. The women all seemed to have been tinted in primary colours, and stood out fantastically brightly as they cut swathes through the crowd and gave enormous, full-bodied laughs. A barmaid swanned through the chaos, carrying empty glasses and dutifully responding to leers; she tipped her chin at Holmes and said, “Anything for you, sir?”

“No thank you, madam, I’m merely here to meet somebody—specific,” Holmes said, as the young woman’s expression grew arch, and then irritably disappointed. “Forgive me, dear lady.” Holmes extricated herself, and gave the barmaid a polite nod. She didn’t know, Holmes thought, scanning the pub crowd.

After her ruminations on secrecy, catching sight of her quarry was like a dull punch to the stomach.

In the corner, Miss Adler, hair shoved under her hat, had her lap full of a girl with hair that shone honey-coloured in the glow of the public house. The young woman’s arms were bare and her breasts threatened to spill from her bodice whenever she laughed—and she laughed often. Miss Adler was _making_ her laugh, saying things up to her and then watching her face with a proud smirk as the girl burst out giggling. There was something of the peacock about her, as if she were fanning her feathers—except only male peacocks did that, Holmes thought, her own face entirely impassive. She watched as Miss Adler spread long light brown fingers on the other woman’s hip, and turned her face so that her lap’s occupant might whisper into her ear and kiss her cheek. Suddenly, Miss Adler’s eyes opened. They were breathtakingly dark. Not for the first time, Holmes made the mistake of looking straight into them.

Irene Adler smiled.

And then she coaxed her companion into leaving. It was so masterfully done that Holmes couldn’t help but watch. Miss Adler did it, somehow, by begging the girl to stay. One moment her lap was full of her, and the next Miss Adler was sighing, looking wryly pained; then the girl was playing hard to get, or so she thought, darting to her feet and smiling wryly at the— _young man_ , Holmes thought, this person she must think was a well-off young gentleman. Miss Adler looked younger in trousers than she did in skirts. So perhaps this particular fresh-faced dandy was just over from the States, with not quite enough money to spend but enough American enthusiasm to try his luck and hope his face was handsome enough to get him where cash got less attractive men. Perhaps that was whose lap the young woman had been sitting in.

Miss Adler reached for the other woman’s hands, face expressing an open, smiling plea which wasn’t quite insincere, but merely suggested that oh, she’d desperately love to have her with her—but it was really alright if she wouldn’t come, she’d find someone else. The girl laughed and spiralled off, twitching her sea-green skirts, blowing kisses and leaving lingering looks which Irene did not return—preferring to glance across at Holmes and jerk her chin up. Holmes felt a grimly amused jolt of recognition for the gesture. It meant that the coast was clear of women, and that men might begin to talk.

Neither looked away. Holmes picked her way across the room, suffering elbows to her ribs and reddened lips to her ear with a single-minded calm. Irene Adler waited tucked against the wall. Her suit was a soft, dark grey. Her elbow was on the table, and her chin cupped in her hand. There was a pint glass in front of her, nearly drained. She watched Holmes advancing through the crowds with a sphynx-like stillness. “Miss Adler,” said Holmes, sitting down in the circle of her influence.

Irene Adler had reeled in her catch, Holmes thought cautiously, but she gave the impression of a woman waiting for something. The impression of someone waiting for something, anyway. Suddenly she was not entirely convincing as a man, though only minutes ago only previous acquaintance had alerted Holmes to the fact that it was indeed Irene Adler sitting there in the corner. She had dropped some of the peacocking masculinity after she had chased the girl from her lap. Now, watching her was confusing. She volleyed carelessly and freely between male and female. 

_How_ , Holmes didn’t know.

“Mr Sherlock Holmes. It is a pleasure to see you undisguised.”

“I only wish I could say the same to you, madam.”

“Oh, hush. It was very clever of you to find me here,” Miss Adler said with a smile which burned quietly, as she stroked patterns onto the sticky wood of the table.

“Considering you told me the name of the place yourself, and that I do not yet know why you want me here at all...”

“Well, you noticed what I was telling you,” she said with an amusement that suggested Holmes might stop pretending to possess modesty any moment—that she would not be offended by arrogance. She took her hand away from her face and sat up straight to tilt her head to one side. “Observation is the most of your genius, is it not? Though I must also credit your significant ability when it comes to disguising yourself, staging fights, fixing fires and being generally deceptive.”

“Ah. You noticed.”

“Eventually. I see you don’t quibble with the notion that you do in fact possess genius.”

“Against someone with a weaker will, I might. Against you, madam—I suspect everything you say is what you wish to say, and I confess myself much too lazy to indulge in pointless debates.” Miss Adler had started to quiver with laughter at the start of Holmes’ statement, and by the end of it she was smiling widely, looking far from unflattered.

“You delight me,” she said, leaning back with an immodest tenderness in her eyes, which then flicked upwards, over Holmes’ shoulder. “Hm. And now that we’re in each other’s company, I believe we should enjoy it elsewhere.”

“Has your deluded conquest realised she’s been spurned?” Holmes murmured into her own fingers as she brushed them thoughtfully across her mouth and carefully didn’t look around. Miss Adler was slowly moving to her feet, reaching for her pint glass and dutifully draining the last of it.

“Deluded? You are _hard_ on her,” Miss Adler murmured, setting down the glass with a sharp click. “It is merely that no one knows what to think of me.” She replaced her gloves, adjusted her hat, and flashed her teeth from beneath it as Holmes stood up. “And so they think the worst. It shall be ever so much more peaceful if we take a stroll rather than sit in here, much as I’d like to raise a glass with you.”

Holmes turned, and saw honey-haired Livia muttering with the barmaid, jerking her head viciously in the direction of where Holmes and Miss Adler stood. When she accidentally caught Holmes’ eye, Livia looked away, and muttered with increased intensity. Around them, other people were pretending not to listen to their murmurs, with the rigid, fascinated alarm of those overhearing scandal. Holmes gazed impassively at them for a moment and then started towards the door. Irene Adler kept close to her side as they cut a path through the chatter and laughter. “What do you fear they take us for?” she inquired quietly, not looking at Irene.

“Which of them?” Miss Adler inquired, calm and quick by her side. Out of the corner of her eye, Holmes realised she had not adopted a masculine gait. “You quite offended the barmaid; she probably takes you for the sort of man who might, ah, meet another man in a bar.” The words swelled with significance beyond their proper definitions. Holmes gave her a sharp look. Irene Adler raised her eyebrows and smiled, and then they were out in the early-year cold again.

“Whereas Livia...I shall freeze. Men’s clothing is so thin,” Miss Adler lamented. “How do you stand it? Men should have petticoats, poor things.”

Holmes breathed in deeply through her nose and glanced over her shoulder, automatically offering her arm. Sticking to protocol—or something like it. “‘Whereas Livia’, madam?” she asked, disengaging her brain from the question entirely in order to let it focus on the matter of what Irene Adler wanted, preferably without any consideration of what Irene Adler _meant_ or what she might know. She glanced back, and Miss Adler’s smile was devious. She looked down at where the other woman’s fingers had slipped to the inside of her elbow—and noted that Miss Adler had, in gentlemanly form, taken the outer step of the pavement. Holmes' lips tightened.

“Whereas Livia is probably covering her own sins by hissing to dear Peggy that I am a Marjory boy who should never have been let in, even though she knows the truth,” Irene Adler said, giving a gentle, gloved squeeze to the inside of Holmes’ elbow and by doing so dragging her mind into her body, shattering her concentration. “You said I was disguised,” Miss Adler added, managing to keep pace admirably, refusing to be dragged. “I am and I am not. Certainly, to those who don’t know what goes on under their own noses, this is a disguise. To those who understand the complexities of human nature...to those who observe...it is more a signal, a sign shared between those who live their lives a little unusually. Me. Livia.” Her index finger crooked, pressing into the inside of Holmes’ upper arm for a confusing, breath-stopping moment, in a place just above her elbow. “You.”

What tightened around Holmes’ throat wasn’t fear. Just dread, thick and choking. A horror clawing slowly right into her heart. She walked on, Miss Adler having to near jog to keep up.

Irene Adler knew. Holmes’ vision fragmented and kaleidoscoped, her heart hammering sickeningly in her chest; Irene Adler knew. Her defenses were cracked and Miss Adler might drag her out of them, if she liked. She could ruin her, take her work away from her, let Watson know—oh God. It was not just the consequences, however, which made her mouth taste coppery and her eyes unable to focus on anything around her—which made her feel like she was drowning in her own deception. Irene Adler _knew_ and the very fact itself was like a hand on her throat. She felt stripped to her bones. The wind blew through her. The world loomed up and then reeled away from her. Her breath staggered in and out of her lungs. 

“You wished to present me with a proposal,” Holmes said, quite calmly through her private apocalypse, trying to keep the street around her from blurring into chaos.

“Did I say as much?”

Sweat was prickling under the black, starched collar of the clergyman’s shirt. Holmes walked on, continuing to operate with mechanical precision. “You lured me here.” 

“Lured! You are quite as sensational as your biographer. Is he writing another book, like the rumours say? I so enjoyed—”

“ _Miss Adler_.” It was a snarl. With a sudden change of direction, Holmes spun them both into a side-alley, the muscles of her cheeks aching from how tightly her teeth were gritted. There, they stood face to face in the shadow but didn't touch, Miss Adler having snatched her hand away from Holmes’ arm. Her chin was lifted, her mouth resolute, and one half of her face was lit up in black and gold by the light which flooded only so far into the skint cobbled lane which Holmes had pulled them into. She looked half masked. “I beg you,” said Holmes, her voice quiet and detached, suddenly quite cold.

“I cannot tell you,” whispered Miss Adler, “until I know that it shall be worth my disclosure.”

“What can I possibly give you to convince you?”

“What no one else could.” Miss Adler’s words were gilded with something expectant as she stared back into Holmes’ eyes. There was a glint of something greedy in her gaze. Holmes stared at her, knowing what she wanted—and realising she was being tested. And of course, if Irene Adler wished to have reassurance of her skills of deduction before confessing why she had made Holmes meet her, it stood to reason that her confession was in fact a request—or a demand—for Holmes to use those same skills to aid her in some way.

In her state of dull, creeping horror she felt disconnected from the facts, but nonetheless they arranged themselves. In her mind, Watson read out dates, Godfrey Norton took cabs to the Inner Temple, and unfinished opera houses burned. She could barely feel her extremities, she realised. Her lips were numb. She licked them, and inquired, “Would you like me to begin when the Prince met you or when Le Théâtre d’Or burned?”

Irene Adler’s eyes widened just a fraction. Holmes seemed to see the movement magnified, whirling. “I would rather not revisit 1885,” Miss Adler murmured.

“As you wish.” Distant. Her words were perfectly enunciated, numbed lips and slow sluggishness of brain notwithstanding. “Then we begin in 1888. Your companion, Godfrey Norton, was opening a theatre—an opera house, I imagine, for I am sure it was intended to be a gift to you. You and a female friend were in the unfinished building. You escaped, and she did not. Her body was recovered but never identified. For two months, you shut yourself off from the world, retiring from the stage without making any announcement of such, simply missing engagements and scheduled performances, and in April of last year you were rumoured to be dead. Somehow, you avoided being publicly associated with the tragedy. Still, what strikes me most about the catastrophe is that it occurred when the Prince of Wales was paying a royal visit to Paris—the very man who, three years previously, and I regret to bring you back, fathered the child you...”

“Lost,” said Irene Adler, her face tilted up towards Holmes. Holmes lowered her eyes and opened her mouth, and Miss Adler held up a hand, her leather glove shining in the gaslight. “Not the sort of loss,” she said softly, “for which you might offer condolences. Thank you.” Holmes hesitated and gave a slight inclination of her head, allowing the silence. “Will you get to the crux of the matter, Mr Holmes?”

“Indeed, dear lady. Presently, I shall do just that. It is commonly known amongst the ostlers of the Serpentine Mews that every time Godfrey Norton visits you at your home, he...” The way Irene Adler’s mouth opened slightly suggested she was trying to taste the word. The dread in Holmes’ throat made her have to pause on it, choking slightly. “...then proceeds to take a cab to the Inner Temple, where either he is attempting to coax a barrister into taking the case you will soon bring before the courts, or he has already found a suitable lawyer and is trying to prepare the case with him. I imagine it is the latter, given that you are ready to release the photograph central to the aforementioned case. Not, of course, that it is the photograph which is so scandalous. Rather, it is the letters he wrote to you—for in them, you believe there is evidence that the Prince of Wales himself ordered the theatre to be burnt to the ground.”

The silence stretched. Irene Adler seemed to sag against the wall, her lips parting delicately. They were less than a foot apart; it was almost as if Holmes could feel Miss Adler’s heart reverberate through the air between them. “Mr Holmes,” she said, “you are entirely marvellous. But now, sadly, I must tell you that I know the truth.”

A cold hand seized Holmes’ airway, cold enough to make her lips numb. The world blurred. Dread, along with chilly and painful terror, lurched in her stomach. The obvious facts stretched before her like an endless desert; Miss Adler was a manipulator of secrets, and Holmes’ hidden depths were valuable ones. How she abhorred blackmailers, she thought, with a dull revulsion. Her expression did not change. “And which truth would that be?” she inquired.

“The truth that Sherlock Holmes is not,” Irene Adler said; Sherlock Holmes did not shake, “a magician.”

The world stilled. Miss Adler leaned companionably closer. “You tell such a wonderful story. And you are so close to the facts, too, though your mistake is rather an essential one. Would you like to know why I have, in your own words lured you here? That is—would you like to know what I really plan to do? Better yet, would you like to know how you shall help me do it?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
>  **"Le Théâtre Américain", "Le Théâtre de l'Aigle d'Or"** \- The American Theatre, The Golden Eagle Theatre/Theatre of the Golden Eagle. Fun story: I have been spelling "américain" wrong for years, apparently. Writing, it teaches you things.
> 
>  **"ma robe est abîmée!"** \- "My dress is ruined!"
> 
>  **"Le Théâtre d'Or"** \- The Theatre of Gold/The Golden Theatre.
> 
>  **"au secours"** \- French for "help".
> 
>  **"it gives five different possible birth places"** \- Irene Adler in this story borrows a lot from Adah Isaacs Menken, more of which will become apparent the more flashbacks I can cram into this godforsaken thing; some people have in fact argued that Adah was ACD's inspiration. 'The Menken' gave countless different accounts of her early life, and claimed to have been born in/grown up in all sorts of different places; she also claimed numerous different birth names, one of which was Dolores Adios Los Fiertes, hence Irene's briefly adopted 'endless Spanish name'.
> 
>  **"the scandalous revue at the Folies Bergère and the re-election of Jules Grévy"** \- The former refers to a famous Parisian cabaret/music hall, which put on its first music hall review in 1886. It felt relevant. Irene Adler is a bit of a demimondaine, after all, even though she's not quite into the Gay Nineties yet. The latter is what it says on the tin.
> 
>  **"artists bemoaning how the plans to build the Tour Eiffel slighted French taste"** \- THE ARTISTS' PROTEST. "We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection…of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower…" How could I not? Incidentally, when the main body of the story takes place—that is, March 1889—the Eiffel Tower was just being completed, though it would be a couple of months before it actually opened.
> 
>  **"consider Miss Langtry"** \- Holmes refers, of course, to the lovely Lillie Langtry, a celebrated beauty and another suggested inspiration for the original Miss Adler. (I must admit I prefer Adah for a whole host of reasons, including the fact that I couldn't get into Lillie's autobiography, whereas Adah was a cracking writer and a took a sort of mad inventor approach to her own history, as already mentioned). Lillie Langtry was indeed a mistress of Bertie's, but their relationship was pretty much an open secret, from what I understand. She became a semi-official royal mistress. Also, a reported exchange between then: 'I have spent enough on you to build a battleship.' 'And you have spent enough in me to float one.' Could have come right out of (this version of) Irene's mouth.
> 
>  **"a Marjory boy"** \- A rent boy.


	3. "Do you like him, as a man?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on the rating: this is the chapter which earns its keep regarding the term 'explicit'.
> 
> A note on French: same rules apply—translations at the end, and corrections always welcome.
> 
> A note on my own brilliance: ...nowhere in the original story is Irene's safe mentioned to be anywhere near the mantelpiece. It's accessed by a bell-pull, that's all the detail ACD gives. Considering plot + how well I thought I knew SCAN, given how much I've been trawling through it for this story, this is a hilariously huge oversight. APOLOGIES. It has now been rectified—by having the bell-pull next to the mantelpiece/fireplace. Yes. Ahem.
> 
> A note on canon: where we're going, we don't need canon. This chapter marks the OFFICIAL DEPARTURE from the canon timeline! That is, the timeline Watson invented like a lying liar. :,D

**Le Théâtre d’Or, Paris, 1888**

The smell of sawdust was ticklish and harsh, threaded through with the faint wet scent of roses. In the red darkness behind her eyelids, Irene seemed to feel the room hold its breath—and then exhale with her as she pulled back from Marceline’s mouth and stared into her wide eyes, which were fringed with lashes so pale they were almost transparent. The soft brown pigment Irene had watched Marceline apply to them in the morning was by now worn to nothing.

Irene raised a hand. “No—don’t close your eyes.” Obediently, Marceline’s ghostly eyelashes swept upwards again. Irene brushed a fingertip along the spiky lower row, as delicately as she could. Marceline, who was afraid of absolutely nothing and loved to be touched no matter where, didn't even tremble. Instead her mouth curved in a confused but patient smile, her pupils wide and dark like tiny bullet holes.

“They’re really there,” she told Irene, her voice gently dry, “even though you probably can’t see them by now.”

Irene relented, putting her hand on Marceline’s cheek, enjoying the warm blush of her skin. The air in here was a little too cold to be doing stupid things like taking her hands off her, she decided. Marceline’s eyes lowered back to hers. “You fuss about them so,” Irene sighed. The conversation was unimportant; they had let it fall into a lazy, natural rhythm, like waves lapping at an evening seashore. A background wash-in wash-out of words. Their voices were slow and syrupy. They spoke French. They left spaces between sentences for kisses.

Marceline’s mouth found Irene’s again, and she explored the inner curve of Irene’s upper lip with her lower. Something ruptured in Irene’s chest and her breath staggered out of her mouth in a desperate rush before she pressed her lips more firmly to Marceline’s, demanding kisses from her.

They were tight in each other’s arms, standing in an unfinished room which would one day be Irene’s dressing room. In spirit, at least. Other performers would use it—but it had been marked _la loge d’Irène_ on the blueprints from the very first day of planning, and Alexandre never spoke of it as anything else. He had pressed the key into Irene’s hand with all the secrecy of one speaking to an illicit lover, and told her to take a look for herself—and not to bring Godfrey.

She hadn’t brought Godfrey.

Marceline’s hummingbird heart was vibrating against Irene’s front, her hand at the base of Irene’s spine keeping her pressed tight. Warmth was bleeding through the thin white cotton of Marceline’s camisole, which was all that covered Marceline’s breasts. Beneath, her corset, smooth as cream, pinched her in. One of Irene’s hands was tucked at the innermost corner of Marceline’s waist, as if trying to find where she was warmest. Their skirts—for Marceline had only removed her bodice, and Irene was still fully dressed—fell in parallel lines and frothed together on the floor. The toe of Irene’s evening boot nudged the toe of Marceline’s shoe, displacing the sawdust beneath their feet. They kissed. They kissed again. They stole kisses, fashioning them out of thin air and warming them up between their mouths, passing them from tongue to tongue. They gilded them with sighs.

“I hate to be invisible,” Marceline said against Irene’s cheek, as Irene’s fingers unhooked her corset. In the cage of her chest, Irene’s heart clenched fiercely.

“You couldn’t be invisible if you tried,” she insisted, dropping Marceline’s corset to the floor, sliding her hands up her freed torso. Marceline’s camisole stuck to her skin where she had been sweating against the restriction of her corset all day. The cotton was almost translucent. Her breasts were heavy in Irene’s hands. Irene swallowed.

“I meant my eyelashes,” Marceline said innocently, her hands dropping to her skirts and pulling them up just slightly, “of course.”

She was moving backwards like the dancer she was, leaving Irene to drop her hands to her sides in the middle of the room and for a moment just watch her. Marceline’s chest was heaving, her nipples a dark, dusky rose colour beneath her thin camisole, which, as Irene watched, she pulled over her head and dropped onto the sawdust-covered floor, so that she was left in just her skirts and her stockings. The candlelight—for the electric lighting was not quite yet ready—flickered over her, making shadows play tricks on her bare skin. Irene's mouth was dry, her mind for a moment too full of Marceline for her to think about saying anything. She licked her lips, and in doing so found her tongue. “You’ll be picking sawdust out of your clothes for days,” she said, her voice hoarse. It wasn't a terribly erotic thing to say, or it shouldn't have been, but Irene heard how her own voice ached in her throat with all the countless other things which hadn't made it past her lips. _I want you right here. I want to spread you out on the floor and fuck you—or make love to you—or both, perhaps one after the other. I want to smell like you for days. I want to bury my face where you're warm and wet_ —as if she could hear every word, Marceline blushed and smiled and raised her eyebrows and held out her arms, fingers uncurling.

“Perhaps you could help me.”

Irene surged forward, almost crashing into Marceline’s arms, and they kissed again, wet and hard as if they were both desperately trying to press themselves as close as they could possibly be, here in this brick and mortar love letter Alexandre and Godfrey had written for Irene, which Irene—hated. _Hated_. Irene wrenched her mouth away from Marceline’s and dropped her head to her shoulder, panting. “Oh God, I’m so glad you’re here,” she gasped against Marceline’s bare collarbone, sucking a ruddy mark onto her skin, breaking blood vessels with her mouth, her hands clutching at Marceline’s waist. She didn’t quite know what she meant, or why she was saying it, only that she felt it, wanted it.

She especially wanted it here. It was a glorious defilement. No, a rebellion. No, a—a vandalism, a breakage, a—an act of love. Brick and mortar didn't do anything for her. This was a cage, not a monument. God—why did people want to build altars to her, when all Irene wanted them to do was love her?

—but Marceline's mouth was sucking hotly at Irene's ear lobe and, oh, she could feel herself unravelling, and Alexandre and Godfrey seemed so far away.

The sounds of urgent kisses and rustling silk filled the room, until Irene’s knees hit the floor with a thick, fabricky thud and sent sawdust flying like a puff of golden snow. “Pull your skirts up, darling. Marceline. I want to _see_ you.” Marceline pulled up her skirts around her hips, and Irene’s hands went flying up the insides of her legs, stroking over the silk of her stockings, seeking out skin.

Marceline didn’t wear drawers. The stripe of dark blonde curls between her legs was beaded with sweat and her own wetness, and Irene pressed her nose to it, inhaling her. She wanted Marceline deep down in her lungs, she thought, behind the damnable cage of her ribs, in the prosaic, pumping muscle of her heart. “Get down here,” Irene ordered, her chin wet with her, trying to urge her downwards with her hands on her thighs.

She wasn’t sure whether she really pulled Marceline down or whether Marceline fell, but she came down in a rush of skirts, giggling and puffing sawdust into the air—it was in her hair, Irene realised, and the folds of her dress. She joined in with Marceline’s laughter and kissed her, her mouth full of the taste of her cunt.

Sticky-mouthed and sweaty-handed, they touched and snatched and kissed each other until Marceline was sitting back against the wall, her legs bent up and spread wide, and Irene was between then. A curl of hair which had escaped Irene’s chignon stuck to the side of her face in a black spiral. A flush had crept from Marceline’s bare chest, up her neck, to stain her cheeks. “I want,” Marceline said, but didn’t finish the sentence even after Irene had finished kissing her breath out of her lungs; perhaps there wasn’t anything to finish it with. Irene pressed her face to Marceline’s chest and then tried to find all the parts on Marceline’s body which were warmest and strangest and most intimate; the stripes of damp heat beneath the swell of each breast, the sweat-salty curls under her arms, the pucker of her navel.

Some people said women had no passion.

Her fingers snuck between Marceline’s thighs, and she found her wet and open for her touch; Marceline rippled and mewled, raising up her hips with a wanton stretch.

Some people said women had no desire.

“I want,” Marceline said again, as Irene’s thumb slid over the swollen bead of her clitoris, and, “please,” and, “oh, God, oh, the fucking Virgin—”

But Irene wasn’t anything but desire, she sometimes felt. She was a collection of wants, more purpose than person, forcing herself on and on and on and trying to reach further.

“Tell me,” Irene said, her voice dropping low in her throat, her thumb pressing, stroking, circling, “tell me.”

And why was Godfrey supposedly so different to her? Why should it matter who played male and who played female—in bed, alone, as lovers? Why should anything have to matter then but them? But still Godfrey told her that she should lie still, that Godfrey should lie atop her, and Irene wanted to tell her _I want you, not a man..._

“I want your mouth, I want your mouth _on me_ , I want you to—I like it when you're dripping and laughing and you don't stop when I —”

Irene mouthed at Marceline’s nipple then let it fall from her mouth and looked up. From below, Marceline was even more beautiful than she was when looked at head on; Irene always thought this, until she looked at her head-on and revised her opinion. Her cheeks with flushed, damp, pink; her mouth was a delicate swollen heart. She was wildly pretty. By day—by night—Marceline kicked the can-can. Hundreds of men wanted her.

That wasn’t why Irene was with her.

She always thought that was the reason—before she kissed her or buried her face in the swell of her breasts or pressed her hand between her legs. She always thought she was doing this to stake her claim on men’s ground, to bury her fingers deep inside Marceline and fuck her like she was trying to fly a banner, make a point, stand her ground and prove the vicious, howling strength of her own desire—

Or she thought she was doing this so that Alexandre would come in the next morning and bark at the carpenters for deviating a millimetre for his instructions, and he would stand where Irene had made Marceline squirm against her lips, not even knowing, like the fool he was—

Or she thought she was doing this because Godfrey liked to spread Irene’s legs with hers like a man might, and hold her down against the bed, and when Irene she had asked Godfrey if _she_ could hold her down the answer had been _that isn’t how this works_ —

Now, one of her fingers was crooked, clenched inside Marceline’s tight warmth, stroking her from the very inside, and it was for no one, no one but them.

“I have to taste you.”

“ _Yes_.”

Irene slid her finger out and Marceline made a whimpering sound Irene wanted to lick from her mouth—but she was moving in the opposite direction. Downwards. She lay on her front, sliding her arms under Marceline’s thighs, and breathed her in again, the wild, jungle smell of female arousal mixing saltily with sawdust and sweat. Here, she could look at her, the delicate pink of her spread lips, framed by blonde hair. Wet. She traced the outline of Marceline’s sex with the very tip of her tongue, feeling how she shook and shuddered helplessly against her, restraining herself from bucking up. Then she pressed the gentlest kiss to the lips of Marceline’s cunt—

“Oh—"

"Would you like something? Marceline? My darling?" Irene's lower lip just brushed the bud of Marceline's clitoris on the upper sweep of her innocent _darling_. Marceline's moan was throaty and desperate. 

Irene gave up on restraint. She dug her fingernails in, five pink crescents on each of Marceline’s thighs, and groaned, and _licked_ her, slow and lewd, once, twice...again. Harder. Faster. More urgently. Again. Again.

Could the sheer strength of a woman's desire break the law? Could a woman covet something with enough ferocity to make her rip up the rules and take what she wanted, between her fingers, between her lips, her teeth, bite and suck and lick until she had everything, everything she wanted? —yes. Yes. She didn't have to prove it to anyone. She didn't want to think about her passion. She wanted to be swept through with it, breathless, unthinking. She'd suffocate down between Marceline's thighs if she wanted to. She'd drown.

Marceline was wet, wild, nuzzling her sex into Irene’s mouth and gasping high above her. Irene moaned against her. She sucked, she licked—she scratched Marceline’s thighs until they were a mess of pink and white lines, her hands slipping and grasping as Marceline's hips jolted up. Wetness dripped from her chin, salt and sweat on her tongue. The curls of blonde hair rough were against her lips, cheeks, nose. She was trying to drag Marceline out of herself and into her mouth. She was trying to breathe her in. Marceline tasted like the sea, sharp and dangerous, full of things Irene didn’t understand and didn’t know the names of, and her climax crashed over them both like a wave.

Afterward, sticky with sawdust and sweat and sex, Irene panted and grinned like she had been the one pushed over the edge, looking and feeling like a castaway washed up on an island shore—damp, delighted and storm-tossed. The idea made her laugh breathlessly. She pushed herself up on her elbows. “You look so ruined,” Marceline breathed, barely moving her lips, her eyes only just open.

Irene licked the taste of her slowly off her lips and raised her eyebrows. Marceline could talk, after all; sprawled against the wall with her blonde ringlets coming down and her legs thrown wide, she looked like a debauched doll. A sudden shock of arousal hit Irene like another of those waves, left her gasping; her drawers were already soaked through, she knew. She was aching. But now wasn't the time. In few minutes, Marceline would be stretching lazily to life, batting her translucent lashes and sliding down, down between Irene's leg, lapping at damp cotton, breathing—in her sly, wanton way— _Mademoiselle, please let me taste you_ , in that way of hers that made Irene want to kiss her and _bite_. Now, though, Marceline was warm and exhausted, and reaching out to her. Irene tipped forwards into her arms. She closed her eyes. Marceline pressed their cheeks together and sighed. “I love your eyelashes, my darling,” Irene crooned to her. The silence washed around them. 

It wasn’t that night that they were interrupted by the smell of burning. It was the next time they came there, just four days later—Marceline still (she claimed) finding sawdust in her hair.

**London, 1889**

**22nd March**

Holmes unfolded the letter slowly, knowing what it would say. The paper did not tremble in her hand, but she kept it angled carefully away from her companions—just in case.

“What is it?” the Prince demanded urgently. Holmes knew without looking that his teeth were gritted, his body body drawn up with anxiety which was slowly but surely curdling into thick, bitter anger. “My God, Mr Holmes, you said this would be over by now. What does she say?”

In one room of her mind, Holmes clicked through possibly answers with a mathematical efficiency, face gravely expressionless. In another compartment, separated from the countless other honeycomb cells of her brain by something like mental glass, so that all its workings were both quite clear and quite separate, she wondered why she was surprised at having been double-crossed by Irene Adler.

“She has left her house, preferring to lodge where she will not be interrupted or waylaid, and she has extended the deadline,” Holmes said finally, her words colourless and calm. The ink on the page was still slightly wet; they had missed their quarry by minutes, perhaps seconds. “She will release the photograph and the letters in exactly a week.”

They stood, Sherlock Holmes, Dr John Watson and the Prince of Wales himself, in trio upon the steps of Briony Lodge, until recently the home of Irene Adler. This early in the morning, the great white house had a dormant look about it, as if it were deep in a slack-jawed slumber. Its square simplicity, charming when properly woken up, now seemed sullen and cold, like a turned cheek. The front door, however, was cracked open like a single sleep-crusted eye, and just in front of it stood Miss Adler’s either thieving or extraordinarily well-paid lady’s maid Beth—judging, that was by the fact that she could afford a corseted waist, the pin marks on her hands and the smell of scented hair lotion obvious from three paces away, and of course, Miss Adler herself had given up the name: “Beth, fetch water, some to drink and some to clean the wound...”

Holmes narrowed her eyes at her, not just because the memory of Miss Adler conducting her remarkably organised aid effort was so sudden and irritatingly vivid. Beth’s face gave nothing up, just as it had failed to give anything up since she had opened the door and said _Miss Adler isn’t in, sirs, and she asked me to say she she’ll not be in for a while, but she did leave a letter—which of you is Mr Holmes?_

The Prince—painstakingly attempting anonymity, in his smart but hardly royal hat and cloak, his unmarked brougham waiting in the street behind him—had suffered the indignity of being merely _sir_ at first greeting and instead had prickled at the fact that Irene Adler was leaving Holmes letters. He hadn’t stopped prickling since.

Holmes folded the letter with slow, precise movements, grimly irritated at herself for her own surprise. Beside her, she could almost feel the Prince of Wales’ lip curling. She waited for it to bubble over without bothering to turn towards him. “The woman will see me killed,” he finally muttered, rubbing a hand across his mouth and beard and shaking his head. His voice was quietly ragged, his teeth still gritted.

“Will she?” Holmes murmured, secreting the letter carefully inside her coat. “I believe she prefers to see you ruined, sir.” 

“You must find her,” he said, trying to stare at Holmes, who foiled his attempts by refusing to quite turn her head far enough to meet his eyes—though she did turn her cheek far enough to show some willing, and gave a fraction of a nod.

“Misuss didn’t leave an address,” said Beth suddenly, with a kind of sudden, uncertain daring. She glanced jerkily between the three of them, pausing each time on the Prince. Holmes privately gloried in her suspicion that Beth saw right through the Prince’s rather shoddy disguise and was simply choosing not to recognise him out of either defiance or denial. “For where you might find her, like.”

Holmes inclined her head. “That was only to be expected. Now, if you will allow me to invite myself in, might I study something inside the house? It would not take too long.” Beth hesitated on the brink of an obvious ‘no’, so Holmes pressed on. “Just the sitting room—if you would be so kind. For ten minutes, if not less. I would be perfectly content for you to supervise.” Beth hesitated, and then, receding back into herself once more as if exhausted by her sudden burst of talkative defiance, nodded. She turned and led them down the hallway and into the sitting room—Holmes remembered the way very well, though naturally she avoided mentioning it. In any case, moving through Irene Adler’s house as herself was a new experience. For instance, she could actually walk through the doors rather than be carried. A novelty.

For a moment, Holmes simply stood in the centre of the sitting room, taking it in with an ease which disguise had made impossible on her earlier visit. It was pale, still, and so fashionable that it seemed to strain urgently and nervously forwards in its desire to be perfect. Each glossy surface was bathed in unmoving electric light, and the curtains hung in frozen waterfalls. Everything seemed not placed but posed; it was curiously breathless, as if the sofa, the chairs, the bureau, even the walls were balanced where they stood, at risk of crashing down at the slightest disturbance. Watson thanked Beth, and glanced around, gaze immediately going from Holmes to the mantel with a sharp curiosity; the Prince looked subtly unsettled by this display of Irene Adler’s life without him, as if he had thought the exterior of the house just a facade for the public. 

Holmes strode to the mantelpiece, which was framed by two separate bell-pulls. She thought how Miss Adler had flung herself towards it, dragging a long swathe of skirts behind her, encircled in smoke. She had gripped the right bell-pull and tugged it just so—

The sliding panel clanged open. Holmes did not jump, but she noticed that Beth did, and the Prince too.

She shook this away, and focused.

The hidden compartment was entirely empty, exactly as she had expected it to be. On the inside, it was panelled in dark wood so glossy it looked almost wet, newer than the mantel—but seemingly chosen to match it. Holmes’ lips quirked at the idea. Ridiculous, but thorough.

She pulled off one glove, stashing it between her teeth, and slipped a hand inside the concealed cabinet, first investigating the roof of the space (just as needlessly smooth and glossy) with her fingertips before stroking down the crease of the corner, pressing against each inner wall. Slowly, she lowered her hand—palm down, fingers spread—to the compartment’s bottom panel, her eyes narrowing...

“You’ve found something?” Watson inquired quietly.

Holmes plucked her glove from her mouth and gave a twitch of a shrug. “Perhaps,” she murmured, not bothering to explain further. Suddenly, she withdrew her hand, still staring into the depths of the hidden compartment, and then dropped her glove into it. Watson gave her a questioning look. Holmes ignored him, and peeled off her second glove, letting it join its partner inside the hidden safe. Watson waited patiently for an explanation. Holmes frowned harder, and added—after she had removed her last cigarette and, momentarily at a loss, tucked it into the band of her top hat—her cigarette case.

“Holmes,” Watson began, and, “Merely testing a theory,” Holmes interrupted him, slamming the sliding panel closed once more and turning neatly on her heel to face the Prince, who was advancing with royal ire in his expression. In this forcefully feminine living room, he looked like a very princely bull in a china shop—dark and looming but nonetheless enormously out of place.

“Mr Holmes,” he boomed, “this situation is—”

“Unacceptable,” Holmes agreed, leaning back against the mantel with her bare hands in her trouser pockets and glancing behind the Prince’s head to where Beth was still standing, in the attitude of one calmly disguising her eavesdropping, apparently inspecting the modelling of the ceiling. “Rest assured I shall correct it,” Holmes added in her most studiously obsequious tone as she glanced back to the Prince.

"Surely we should seek out Mr Norton? She must be with her husband," Watson said, "or at least he must know where she is."

Beth's eyes flickered towards them; Holmes mouth turned slightly downwards in a request that Beth say nothing. After a narrow-eyed, questioning moment, Beth looked calmly away, silent but now visibly much more interested.

Between them, men were talking.

The Prince, of course, had been informed earlier of Miss Adler’s supposed marriage—though what had seemed good news when his fortunes were more secure now seemed to have dwindled to an irrelevance in light of this new turn of events. "Irene Adler might easily take a husband one day and abandon him the next," he insisted, and Holmes saw Beth's mouth harden in dislike. "Mr Holmes, I was assured that those—items would be in my possession by now."

"And so they should have been," Holmes agreed gravely. It was not a lie. Irene Adler had promised, her deep, dark eyes serious and her full lips in a somber line, to be here, now, photograph and letters in hand. "Trust that I shall locate her, and all that she has in her possession. I already have an inkling, in fact, of where she may be." This, again, was absolutely true. “And now we have trespassed too long, and kept Miss Beth from her duties.” Beth turned her head to them when her name was mentioned, as if jerking to life. Holmes fully believed that the Prince, at least, believed her to be a dormant piece of machinery, which activated itself only when necessary. Beth, seeming to see no reason to contradict this view, led them to the door with cool politeness and ushered them out. Holmes gave her a reptilian flash of a smile and lifted her hat to her, murmuring, “Thank you,” not referring to her permission to search the sitting room.

As they strode out of the house, behind the broad silhouette of the Prince of Wales, Holmes clapped a hand to Watson's upper arm, and said, "Watson, there is something you must do for me."

"I am at your service."

"Excellent. Go home to your wife." Ahead of them, without any goodbye, Prince Albert Edward had climbed into his anonymous brougham. The horses, four piebalds, stamped for a moment before setting off in perfect synchronicity, their hoofs clattering as they bore him away. Holmes watched him go with a relief which did not show on her face.

"What?" Watson was demanding.

"Go home to your wife,” Holmes repeated patiently. “You slept at Baker Street last night, after all, which was quite unplanned. No doubt Mrs Watson is beginning to suspect she is a widow. Assure her that is not the case. Then eat an excellent breakfast—for we were rather interrupted in the middle of ours—and do not call upon me or contact me until I wire for you. It is of the utmost importance."

“Holmes, you might simply say that you wish to have privacy in which to think.”

“Ah,” Holmes agreed, “but would you respond so perfectly if I had? Watson, I do mean it. It is vital to me, and not simply a case of needing privacy. I have not given up on all that we discussed last night. You shall see.”

“Yes,” Watson sighed, extricating himself from her arm and raising his eyebrows, half amused and half resigned. “I do tend to, eventually, for all your absurd secrecy. Good day, dear chap.”

“And to you,” Holmes said, with the sort of grandiose formality she occasionally used as a substitute for affection, particularly in public. Watson nodded and turned, stepping up into one of the hansom cabs which rocked by the curb. Holmes watched him go, something thoughtful and unmoving in her face, then shook herself free of her thoughts (he _did not know_ —what? what didn’t he know? one small and inconsequential fact—) to take another of the cabs.

"Baker Street," she said, glancing out of her chosen cab to watch Watson’s peel off in the opposite direction."And quickly.”

The cab jerked and jolted into familiar movement. Holmes leaned back and folded her hands over the top of her stick, lips thinning out.

_(Better yet, would you like to know how you shall help me do it?)_

Really, if anything, it was best to view being betrayed by Irene Adler as a compliment. She was that sort of woman.

Holmes stared out at the blurred shapes of London as they passed, and allowed the motion of the cab to lull her back, turning over her memories of the alley she had pulled Miss Adler into, as if inspecting them for some clue she had missed.

With her back against the wall, lit up in gold and black shadows, Miss Adler had looked somewhere between a beautiful woman and a handsome man. It had been—what had it been like, to see her dressed that way, both similar and different to how Holmes presented herself? Beyond confusing—unnerving—interesting—Holmes couldn't say. But—oh. How intolerable. She was getting distracted. She snapped herself out of it irritably. She had a case to think about. What had Miss Adler said?

Ah. "Shall I tell you what I really plan to do? Better yet, shall I tell you how you shall help me do it?" she had said, and Holmes had arched an eyebrow.

"Madam, I hardly like to get involved with treason." Neither had needed to speak in anything above a murmur—they had been so close that their clouds of crystallised breath had met between them. (Irrevelant; Holmes folded that mental picture away, staring into the air as she was rattled by the cab, her body neglected).

"Oh, you Englishmen.” (Miss Adler had continued, chuckling. ) “Speaking of which, there is your first error. Godfrey? Godfrey knows nothing of this—only what I'm sure Bertie told you; that I have some kind of compromising photograph. Naturally, I do, but it only establishes that the letters are genuine. I have not even told Godfrey where I hide it. As to what allure the Inner Temple holds—I imagine there's a pretty serving-girl there." (Relevant).

"Then you are not preparing a legal case.” (Relevant).

"No. It would never work. Really! Could _I_ try to bring a charge of murder—and attempted murder—against the Prince of Wales? That is a charming idea, but it does not work in reality. As well you know, I imagine. Who does the law listen to, a Prince or a courtesan? Do you think me quite stupid?"

"I think you dangerous enough to worry a man who generally has little to fret about besides the sheen on his medals. The legal route seemed the most threatening."

"Are you complimenting me? Don't answer, I shall work it out myself. But no; no legal case. I find official channels tiresome, really."

"Your true intentions, then, are..."

"Rumour," Irene Adler had said, stealing the word from Holmes’ mouth. Holmes had said, "Ah," and Miss Adler had lowered her lashes, inclining her head as if modestly accepting a compliment. 

"Yes," she had agreed, mouth turned wickedly upwards. "The letters contain nothing conclusive. I would never be so foolish;I mean, speaking of the law, I could never survive him bringing a libel case against me. But Mr Holmes—I swear, he _raves_. He talks about passion as if it were a weapon. When I ceased responding, he kept sending them—threats followed promises rather quickly. They are quite terrifying, as letters go. At least, I was quite terrified by them at the time. I imagine his future subjects will see why, when they are published as an exposé.”

(Of course, relevant. The story of a Prince driven mad by lust for an opera singer, trying to burn down the object of his jealous desire...it was like something out of a novel. It wouldn't _need_ concrete proof. In fact, without it it would spark the curiosity of the public like a closed case never could. There would be theories, arguments, sides taken. And in a way it was quite wonderfully innocent, for a rumour would have no effect on his ascension to the crown. He would retain his social standing. But it would be a public, personal destruction.)

“The fire did not reach the English press.”

“I am aware. All the better. It is more suspicious. In the accompanying article shall be ‘Irene Adler, who resigned from the operatic stage after a terrifying experience in which she was caught in a fire in a theatre house...’ It is a rather good idea, is it not? You seem to have been quietened by it. There is nothing more powerful than public opinion—and after all, my reputation is what he lost me. Defamation seems a fitting punishment—"

"I assure you—"

"Assure me that you will neither underestimate nor interrupt me again and be silent, sir," Irene Adler had said, quite suddenly, her vowels suddenly stretching southwards, no longer New York-or-New Jersey but New Orleans. "Now listen to my proposal. I will reveal the photograph and the letters to the public just as I have always intended to, unless we come to the agreeable, obvious compromise."

And she had looked up to Holmes in expectation of her understanding exactly what this compromise was. It had taken a moment for Holmes to answer, slowly rolling the facts around in her head (as she reshuffled and reorganised them in the cab, too, on her way to Baker Street). “The letters prove a motive and nothing more.”

“Indeed.”

“In other words, the question of who was responsible for the fire is still open.”

“Well,” Miss Adler had said, her smile flooding her face, “quite. Of course, if you were to discover that the reason why that theatre burnt, why Marceline Beauclerc died and why I retired early from the stage, was nothing whatsoever to do with Bertie, I would of course believe you. I would therefore do nothing with my letters and photograph. And if you were to discover that there was, perhaps, some link to, ah, His Royal Highness—then I know that you, sir, believe in justice over patriotism, and would...do your duty.”

“No.”

"No? You would not?"

"No, I will not work under a deadline," Holmes had said, her voice quiet and hard. "And I will not work two conflicting cases simultaneously. You will hand over the letters and the photograph, and then—only then, madam—will I solve your mystery."

"I shall meet you tomorrow, then," Miss Adler had said, rather dryly, “entirely repentant. Provided, of course, Mr Holmes, that you are prepared to keep your side of the bargain.”

And they had left each other in agreement. Holmes had made her way back to Baker Street with a mechanical ease, not feeling the cold or indeed anything which occurred outside of her own head. She had wired to the Prince. Mrs Hudson had informed her that Dr Watson had taken his old room. She had spent the night in the sitting room, frowning and smoking, the possibility of sleep being so out of the question that she did not even consider it. And then—she had come to make good on the first part of the deal, and found Miss Adler missing and her safe empty.

It looked like a betrayal, certainly. Holmes’ fingers gripped tighter at the head of her cane. It looked perhaps too obviously like a betrayal.

And of course, there were things yet to be explained—such as certain unusual features of Miss Adler's safe.

The cab lurched to a stop while Holmes was trying to unfold the layers of Irene Adler’s motives. “Baker Street, sir, as you 'ad directed.”

“Ah. Thank you.” Holmes passed up a rough approximation of the fare, untangling her mind from Miss Adler and the Prince of Wales, and stepping down from the cab. She let herself into 221B, then frowned briefly at the doorframe.

“Mr Holmes,” Mrs Hudson said warmly, melting out of the shadows in the hallway. Holmes frowned deeper and then remembered to smile, though her tangled thoughts and the lasting impression of the scowl confused the expression somewhat. Mr Hudson, by now supremely unworried by her tenant's quirks, barely noticed, and continued, “You have a—”

“Visitor,” Holmes said absently, glancing towards the door again. “Yes. A lady in a blue velvet cloak who gave her name as Mrs—” it would have to be Mrs, she thought, for it would give more freedom “—Norton, perhaps?”

“Yes indeed,” Mrs Hudson said. “I do wish, Mr Holmes, that you would tell me when you expect these guests.”

“Assuredly,” said Holmes, which did not entirely make sense. She was already halfway up the stairs. She had seen the thread of blue caught on the hinge of the door, of course, where some sweeping garment had been a little too sweeping for its own good, and the name had occurred to her as the obvious choice when she knew that Miss Adler was attired as a woman. And in truth, she had suspected that Miss Adler would call upon her since Beth first opened the door of Briony Lodge with an envelope clasped in her hand.

In the living room, Irene Adler was posed quite comfortably in Holmes’ armchair. Her face was obscured by a Parisian newspaper from 1888 and her skirts overflowed the chair like a great spill of blue paint. Her gloves were of dove grey silk, crinkling the paper. She gave no sign that she noticed the door opening or Holmes coming in, but as Holmes tugged off her coat and hat and dropped her stick by the door, raising one eyebrow at her visitor, Miss Adler flicked a page and read out a line from the article she was engrossed in.

“‘ _Le corps d’une femme non-identifiée a été retrouvé dans les ruines_...’ They could be talking about the weather, not a woman being burned to death. _Il pleut, et des femmes meurent_. Hand over my photograph, won’t you, Mr Holmes? And the letters. I shouldn’t like us to fall out when we’ve been getting on so well.”

There was a tea tray before her. She had poured a cup, and then neglected it. Holmes supposed that she had had other things which which to occupy herself while waiting—such as searching the living room. From the disturbed papers and shelves, she had been rather thorough—though she had attempted to disguise her efforts by returning everything to almost its proper place. In some instances, it was actually rather hard to spot where Miss Adler had put things out of order in her hunt. 

Holmes turned to gaze thoughtfully at her guest, who was still concealed by the yellowing expanse of last year’s newsprint. She looked as if she'd been sitting in that chair her entire life. Despite the evidence, it was extraordinarily difficult to imagine her scrabbling across shelves or hunting through drawers. Holmes supposed that was the point. “I’m afraid I don’t have them, madam,” she said.

Miss Adler folded the paper closed and laid it painstakingly over the arm of the chair with a heavy sigh. “Neither do I,” she said, her stare hard. Her face was drawn, dark eyes underlined by faint brown-purple bags. She was still striking. Holmes frowned, finding that that curious, changeable air still clung to Miss Adler even when she was so deeply and luxuriantly feminine. “And now, I suppose, we try to convince each other that we’re both telling the truth.”

Holmes snatched up her pipe and began to prepare it as she dropped into the chair opposite Miss Adler, briefly irritated at having being ousted from her preferred spot. “And you insist that one of us must have them?” she murmured, looking at the bowl of her pipe rather than her visitor, tamping down the tobacco. 

“Not necessarily. You, however, have already made your mind up. You think that I betrayed you,” Miss Adler said. Holmes shrugged, putting the pipe to her lips and taking an unlit test draw, unhurriedly judging how she had packed the tobacco.

“Occam’s Razor, Miss Adler. Most likely you have secreted the photograph and letter elsewhere, probably with your associate Godfrey Norton, in order to cover all possible eventualities. Or perhaps you simply dislike my terms.” Satisfied with the pipe, Holmes struck a match, the tiny flame blooming between them. “Your arrival here is merely an attempt to disguise as much.” She held the flame to the bowl of her pipe, charring the tobacco, and glanced upwards as if in afterthought.

Miss Adler’s face seemed to be carved from the very stuff of tragedies. First: Holmes nearly dropped her match. Second: she felt a twinge of revulsion, more with herself for being an audience than Miss Adler for being an actress.

“No,” Irene Adler said, her voice low. “Wrong, I’m afraid. Didn't I say that Godfrey knows _nothing_ about this, Mr Holmes?”

Holmes held her gaze, and lit a second match. “You _told_ me as much, certainly.”

“You do not understand,” Miss Adler said, pushing herself to her feet as if her stillness couldn’t quite contain her emotion. Holmes shook out her match a little too roughly and sucked down smoke while Miss Adler’s gown and cloak fell into new shapes as she straightened up and swept around, resting her hands on the back of the chair. “It was Godfrey’s theatre; you know that, the article says as much. If Godfrey—do try to understand.” Holmes’ eyebrows raised at the idea that she wouldn’t. “Godfrey would take it as a betrayal. As me...manipulating the catastrophe for my own gain.”

“Aren’t you?”

Miss Adler glanced over and said, “It was my catastrophe too.” Holmes glanced away, sighing out smoke. She could feel Miss Adler’s stare on her. She wished she could know for certain what the deuced woman was _seeing_.

“If you publish the letters...”

“I shall hardly need Godfrey’s approval when it is done. I just want silence while I try to do it. I face enough opposition,” Miss Adler said quietly and sharply, moving her gaze from Holmes and instead trying to penetrate the deeper core of the bookshelves. They stared in opposite directions for a few stony seconds, Holmes smoking and Miss Adler simmering.

“Do you like him, as a man?” Miss Adler finally asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bertie. Albert Edward. His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales; do you like him? Do you consider him admirable? Upright? Charming, even? One can forgive charming people a lot of things, I always find.”

The smoke tasted wrong. Holmes sniffed and relit her pipe, taking her time with it, though she hardly needed time to consider her answer. After a long draw, she said, in a haze of smoke, “He strikes me as self-obsessed and small-minded.”

“And quite right too,” Miss Adler pronounced, voice neat and delicate as a schoolmarm’s tick. “Why, then, do you believe him?”

“Miss Adler?”

“What have I done, Mr Holmes?” She was looking at Holmes again, and her eyes burned. Her voice was a current of heat in the air. Holmes breathed out a heady rush of smoke too fast, grey swirls blooming in the space between them, and lowered her pipe slowly, wetting her lower lip and narrowing her eyes. “Have I staged a fight, disguised myself to gain entry to someone’s house and made them believe their house to be on fire? Or have I—and you will pardon my deductions—eavesdropped on private conversations to learn about events in strangers’ personal lives? Have I taken one thousand pounds from a man I dislike to chase a woman I feel ambivalently about for what seems like very little reason?”

“You _have_ , apparently, been searching through my dressing table,” Holmes said quietly, looking away and touching her pipe to her lips. She kept her bandages in those drawers, neatly wrapped beside the thousand pounds the Prince had dropped on her desk.

“He has told you to beware of me,” Irene Adler said tightly, “because he thinks any clever woman who dislikes him must be a snake. And you have fallen for it entirely.”

Holmes finally looked back at her, feeling like she was being pulled by invisible strings. Miss Adler’s chest was rising and falling lightly, rapidly, making her bodice tremble and her cloak ripple like disturbed water. Her hat, slanted forward on her head, cast an oval of shadow over half of her face. “You are prepared to accuse an innocent man of murder,” Holmes said quietly, out of obligation. She knew what Miss Adler’s answer would be.

“I am prepared to do what I must to get what is owed to me. He _is_ the Prince of Wales,” Irene Adler said simply. “Anything less would roll off his back like everything else in the world does. He would not even notice.”

And yet—Holmes did not say—Miss Adler was obviously not _that_ committed to vengeance against the Prince of Wales, or to vengeance against whatever man, woman or mysterious power set the Théâtre d’Or alight in 1888. She just wanted vengeance; the specifics were interchangeable. Or perhaps she was hedging her bets and trying to achieve both...

There was always a _perhaps_ with Irene Adler. She was a woman built of possible alternatives. And now, added to an already volatile mix, her inflammatory letters were— _possibly_ —in the hands of another, unknown party, whose movements could not be predicted.

Holmes snorted smoke dragonishly out of her nose and suddenly launched herself forwards to pour a cup of tea, needing a new occupation for her hands, something to distract her body so it would not try to trip up her mind. She picked the teacup up and stood, pipe in her other hand, before wandering towards the mantel. As Holmes moved, so did Miss Adler, revolving by a small but significant degree with a smooth-oiled silence, as if keeping Holmes within her sights. “You don't think I have them,” Holmes said, one elbow on the mantelpiece, inspecting the wallpaper to better concentrate on the facts.

“Yes. Do you trust me when I say that I don't, either?”

Holmes sniffed, waved away the question with her pipe. “Assuming, dear lady, that I choose to believe your claims, then I must—”

“One does not _choose_ to believe anything—”

The strange outburst was sudden and sharp, where Miss Adler’s anger had previously been held in dignified check, quivering unspoken in the tight lines of her face. She looked faintly annoyed at herself for spitting it out. Holmes frowned at her and sipped her tea, then continued without comment; “—I must know who else knew of your hidden compartment.”

Irene Adler turned her face delicately and sighed, eyelids flickering down. “No one,” she said after a moment, raising her hand as if about to smooth away some tension but dropping it before she could touch her face. “You and I, I suppose.”

“Someone must—”

“Yes, I know,” Miss Adler broke in. Holmes blinked, and frowned—and realised she wasn’t used to being interrupted by...well, women. “I mean that I _know_ of no one else.”

“Your servants?”

“No,” Miss Adler said firmly.

“You have a lot of trust in them.”

Miss Adler arched her eyebrows delicately. It was an expression which spoke volumes about the pain of explaining basic principles of privacy in a house with staff to one who employed no servants. “No, Mr Holmes,” she said. “I leave a strand of my hair caught in the door each time I close it—if it had ever been missing or displaced when I returned, I would have known someone had been prying. It was never moved.”

After a moment’s thoughtful pause, Holmes inclined her head, and let the line of inquiry drop. “Very well. But you have neglected a whole category of people who might know of the safe’s existence. In fact, who must know of it.”

“What—” Her face underwent a spasm of confusion, and then realisation, accompanied by, “Oh.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, I can’t remember the workmen’s names. I told them it would be a curio—an unusual liquor cabinet, I think. They thought me completely trivial and stupid.”

Miss Adler batted about the idea of being thought stupid with an ease which took Holmes by some surprise. “But who designed it?”

“I did,” Miss Adler said—which only heightened Holmes' confusion. If she could design her own devices to keep her secrets—on top of everything else—why was she happy to giggle and titter in front of workmen? “Although a friend from Paris did aid me in certain mechanical innovations."

Holmes lifted her chin, her lips parting, the question of why Miss Adler was so happy to pretend she was stupid becoming irrelevant for the moment. “The way it opens.”

“Indeed. His name is Alexandre Daalmans—he worked with me on some more _usual_ renovations too. He lives in London at the moment. He's an architect. And an artist. And I suppose a sort of inventor.”

“And as he was party to its need for secrecy, Mr Daalmans was aware of its nature, I imagine.”

“Yes,” Irene Adler said, “but if you think _he_ is the thief, then you are completely wrong.”

“And why do you think that?” Holmes said, as if from a distance, talking more to the rim of her teacup than to her visitor.

“Because those letters are of enormous political significance.”

“Journalistic significance.”

“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know it’s the same thing. In any case, Alexandre is a darling, and probably a genius, but he—drifts. He wouldn't understand their value in the slightest. Why, I don’t think he could name the President, never mind the Prince of Wales.”

Holmes closed her eyes, tempted to tell her that she couldn't name the President either and had never needed to. Instead, she rubbed her eyes, put down her pipe and teacup said, “Very well. He remains the best avenue we have.” She pushed herself suddenly away from the mantel, striding in the direction of her coat and hat. "His address, if you please."

"I shall tell the driver,” Miss Adler said, darting towards the door with a whoosh of skirts—and by virtue of having nothing to collect, getting there first.

"No," Holmes said firmly, shrugging into her coat. 

“No?”

Holmes considered saying that she was not in the habit of allowing clients to come as passengers on her investigations—but decided against it. Irene Adler was not to be needlessly antagonised, clearly. “There are too many strands to this matter for us to devote our combined attention to just one at a time. We would be more efficient split up. You have some ability as an artist, do you not?”

Miss Adler blinked, looking momentarily taken aback. "You’ve seen my work?” she asked, and there was such genuine, shocked pleasure in her voice that Holmes almost regretted the truth.

“I have seen your right hand, madam,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “You had mostly washed the usual marks off your hands last night, but when a woman formerly resident in Montmartre meets me with graphite dust staining her nailbeds and a slight disfigurement of the index finger caused by habitually gripping a pencil, I would be a very poor detective not to note that she is used to sketching. Allow me to request a commission. I must have a plan of the theatre—in fact, two. How it would have looked, had it been finished, and how it looked the night of your...catastrophe. I shall return shortly.”

Miss Adler studied her for a moment, and then nodded, gliding off with a whisper of skirts to Holmes’ desk, where she snatched up a pen and dipped it delicately in the inkwell, scrounging what ink was still wet there. “Pencils and paper, then?”

“You found them in your search of my desk,” Holmes said dryly, nodding in the direction of the article of furniture in question as she plucked her last cigarette from her hatband and replaced her hat on her head, “and are attempting to pretend otherwise.”

“No,” Miss Adler replied, her smile quite pleasant. She straightened up and held out one of Holmes’ own cards, on the back of which she had scrawled an unfashionable address. “But I _was_ trying to see if you’d noticed that I’d been through your desk or not. Here. This is where Alexandre lives. Speak French to him, and talk about lighting and, well, me. He shan't trust anyone who stands on ceremony; you should call me Irene.”

Holmes reached out and took the card. The corner of her lips jerked upward, not quite voluntarily. “Good day, Miss Adler,” she said, and left, descending the stairs at a sharp rat-a-tat pace and surging out onto the street.

As for Irene Adler, she avoided the urge to sweep to the window and stare out after the receding figure of her host. Instead she drew herself up to her full blue and gold height as if displaying her plumage—for nobody at all save herself—and crossed to Mr Holmes’ desk, settling herself down behind it. 

*

The address on the back of Holmes’ card proved to refer to a poky set of rooms which could only be reached by a flight of narrow stairs and a corridor smelling of damp and profound boredom. Even the door seemed to sag in its warped frame. She rapped her knuckles against the wood with a smartness which seemed distinctly out of place, and felt the door shudder and stick slightly at each blow. 

For a long while, there was no response. Holmes tried to breathe in as little dust as possible, mostly to have something to do with her time besides wonder why this hallway felt familiar.

Finally there a scuffling noise, as of rats, and a few fumbling clunks of numerous bolts being drawn back. “What...what?” The voice, quiet and displeased, brought her back to herself. The door was still firmly closed, if unlocked; the words were a soft and anxiously irritable mumble from behind it.

“Monsieur Daalmans?” Holmes inquired. Receiving no answer she continued, in her grandmother’s French, “I apologise for the interruption—and so sudden—my name is William Lavoie. I’m a great admirer of your work...” She waited; this was usually enough to get artists of any kind to open a door, at least. There was no response, however. “...and a friend of Irene Adler’s.”

After another few seconds of dusty, disapproving silence, the door clicked open, though only far enough to throw a small strip of light across the floor of the corridor. “Irene. How is she?” The words were cool and suspicious, as if Daalmans were trying to test his visitor. His French was tinged with something Dutch and something else incongruously American.

“Why, she is Irene,” Holmes said, with the faintest of smiles. “Surely you cannot expect me to reduce her to a sentence.”

In the moments of quiet which followed, during which she began to suspect more and more strongly that she had answered incorrectly, Holmes mentally addressed herself with a cool, dull stare, as if to say _what on earth are you talking about_. But then the door opened like a slow, growing smile—if smiles creaked—and revealed Alexandre Daalmans. Holmes was surprised to find him a rival to her height, and distinctly broad-shouldered, if dishevelled and distracted-looking. His dark blonde hair was tousled atop and around his handsome face, kept slightly too long for him to be taken terribly seriously in better society at least when he lived in a garret, for men with more impressive residencies could more easily wear their hair long). His eyes were dark, reddened. His clothes, however, were incongruously dandyish—though not new.

Holmes realised that the uncomfortable, echoing feeling of inexplicable recognition was not because she had seen this before—the entire scene of Daalmans standing confused and dilapidated in his warped doorway—but because she had lived in the middle of it. 1876. Two rooms on Rackham Avenue filled with scientific equipment gathering dust. She had spent most of that year trying to forget herself.

Her polite smile felt lopsided and rictus-like, but she needn’t have bothered. Daalmans himself was struggling, frozen, uncertain whether he had made the right choice in opening the door and trying to force a similar gracious look onto his face over his internal chaos. Holmes felt a grim pang of sympathy. There was a knack to faking a smile. The man did not possess it. “Monsieur Lavoie,” Daalmans said. “What a pleasure it is to meet you. What a surprise. You, ah, you know her well, do you?”

“Reasonably. We met in London, not Paris—”

“Ah, I have known her since 1886,” Daalmans boasted eagerly, appearing suddenly both triumphant and relieved, something in his shut-down face suddenly flickering to life. There was something urgently grateful in how he snatched at the subject of Irene.

“In Montmartre, yes? She spoke of you.”

“She did? ...Sir, do come in.”

As Daalmans backed half apologetically and half uncertainly away from the door, as if he had forgotten quite how one should welcome a visitor, Holmes found herself privately and grimly thinking about how ironic it was that he should be so worried by Holmes’ association with Irene Adler, when Holmes was not even a—

But then that was not actually applicable, she realised numbly.

“Monsieur Lavoie?”

“Mm? Ah. Thank you.” Daalmans was pushing a chair vaguely in her direction with a grating sort of anxiety visible in his face. “I was merely distracted by your—” Holmes glanced at the walls. “Plans.”

By the time she’d said it, it was technically true. 

Ostensibly, Alexandre Daalmans had wallpaper, somewhere. In practice, it was all entirely obscured. From floor to ceiling there were sketches, plans, blueprints and brainstorms. The shapes of a thousand ideas. Some were sketches of imagined ceiling ornaments in peacock colours; some were stark and utilitarian designs for networks of rooms. Casting the eye over too many in quick succession lead to a sort of blurring, the rooms and doors all running together into a sprawling chimera of potential architecture—corridors which wound around church spires, second floor cellars, windows overlooking mazes of stairs. Holmes snapped her brain into shape and the plans resolved themselves into distinct articles, though they were nonetheless slightly unnerving, for a number of them were familiar. Their shapes lit up certain parts of Holmes’ mind, but she couldn’t quite put a place to all of them. Here a town hall, there a home, a theatre, a restaurant, a hotel...

“Oh,” Daalmans said, real pleasure swimming to the surface of his voice. Holmes was relieved by it; it meant he could still feel passion for something. There was no one (and she knew) more difficult to get something out of than someone who had given up even feigning interest in the outside world. By the look of him, Daalmans was close to it, but not quite there yet. He was still clinging onto the skin of the world, his passions tethering him—and providing Holmes with a way in. “Yes, indeed. Of course, I’m very used to looking at them, so I forget how they might seem to new eyes—well, you said you were familiar with my work?”

Holmes dropped into the offered chair, nodding and keeping her eyes on the walls rather than looking at Daalmans, who sat opposite and leaned nervously forwards. Holmes ignored him and touched her lower lip, frowning like a connoisseur. “Quite, quite. I enjoy your passion for modernisation.” She focused on the plan directly opposite her, apparently for a hotel’s ground floor. The foyer was an unusual shape; Holmes flicked through the pages of her mind and found where she had seen it before, just from a slightly different angle. “Your work on the Harman Hotel in Chelsea, in particular...”

“Oh, really?”

“Really,” said Holmes, glancing away from the plan to give Daalmans a very sincere look. She lowered herself from her imagined birds-eye view of the foyer and chose instead to let her ground-level memories roll out around her. The foyer of the Harman had been cream and gold and green, with its milky marble floor lit in dazzling brightness, shadows banished to outside the door as if no darkness whatsoever was permitted. A shame, really, about the murder in one of the upper rooms, which had rendered the hotel out of bounds for respectable society. “Didn’t you electrify it?”

“Aha, no,” Daalmans said, flushing and smiling, pushing a tumbled wash of dirty blonde hair away from his face. It fell back immediately. “That is, not technically. I had little to do with the actual wiring—but I made it beautiful, one might say. I advised on the location of the lights, the switches, the style of lamps and shades and chandeliers—it is all a theatrical production, really, a hotel foyer. One needs to light the performers in, in just the right way, and electric light...well, so many people—especially the English—think electric light is some sort of garish, middle class disaster designed to show up every speck of dust on a lady’s dress. But it needn’t be so. Brighter doesn’t have to mean harsher. Does it?”

“The foyer certainly looked anything but garish,” Holmes said, keeping her eyes flickering over the covered walls. “Brilliant, perhaps.”

“Brilliant! Yes! Yes, I like that. The era of brilliance—yes. I shall use it, if you don’t object—” Daalmans had suddenly launched himself from his exhausted-looking armchair, the movement making a puff of dust rise from the greying green upholstery. He circled, putting his back to Holmes, and surveyed his own work. “...Irene,” he said suddenly. “You did not tell me how she was. I know you said—but in truth, Monsieur Lavoie, how is she? And what has she said about me?”

“Irene? Why, she seems to be doing marvellously. I paid her a visit just yesterday.” This was technically true—though she could see Daalmans' brow quirking, troubled by the level of intimacy paying a visit suggeste. “My wife is just as fond of her as I am,” Holmes added hastily, seeing Daalmans nearly close his eyes in relief. “She asked Irene about her recent remodelling, and your name came up. She gave a most effusive report, and of course I was astonished to learn that you two were acquainted in Montmartre...”

Holmes suddenly could not keep up the inane prattle. Her voice trailed off. Her eyes moved back across the plains of diagrams and sketches, seeking out what she had seen earlier; the plan for a theatre. It looked the right age—and there, in cramped handwriting, slightly darker than the rest as if pressed into the page hard, was the label, _la loge d’Irène_. Irene’s dressing room. She was looking at the plans for the Théâtre d’Or. In one section, colour drew the eye. There was a thin red line meandering about the black marks which represented the walls. It stretched on, intersecting with others of its kind, forming a bloody spiderweb of potential—light. Wiring. The whole theatre was to be electrified—not built and then lit up, but built with electricity in mind. “But in any case,” Holmes said suddenly hearing her own voice only distantly, “you must tell me more about lighting.”

Daalmans had the audibly grind his mental gears to take himself away from the subject of Irene Adler, but the man was obsessed with light; he quickly warmed to his subject. All of this Holmes deduced only from the tone of his voice. His actual words were left to the background.

Daalmans had designed the theatre which had burned to the ground; Daalmans had, too, designed the safe which Irene Adler kept so jealously guarded—the safe which was empty now. Which meant—something, definitely.

Holmes shook her head, said, “How very fascinating,” an accidentally feminine turn of phrase which made her have to force away a grimace before she turned to fix Daalmans more properly in her sights.

On the wall behind him, there was a particularly recent plan—not quite finished, in fact, which was perhaps why she hadn't at first recognised what it referred to. Her mouth opened. “Ah,” she said.

*

Holmes rocketed down the stairs and burst out of the front door, ignoring Daalmans' offence and his landlady’s shock. It was a relief to get back into the street; the bandages around her chest were cruelly tight, the edges digging into old scars on her torso, and it wasn’t until she was breathing fresh air again that could properly appreciate how thick with dust the air inside Daalmans' rooms had been. She swallowed down the tickly urge to cough, however. Instead, she straightened her hat and started to stride down the street, thinking of what her next move should be.

It occurred to her—she did not like to admit it, but it did occur to her—that she should tell Miss Adler about what she’d learnt.

But that was absurd. She could hardly carry out a proper investigation if she interrupted it by running back to inform Miss Adler of every twist and turn, like a schoolboy attempting to please her teacher. His teacher. Oh, it didn’t matter. The point remained; she couldn’t possibly afford to keep Miss Adler up to date, and the very notion was embarrassing. Worse was the fact that she had wasted three whole seconds telling herself just how embarrassing the notion was.

And more important was the fact that Miss Adler wouldn’t believe her, and so there was absolutely no point in trying to convince her.

Holmes’ mouth set grimly. In truth, she didn’t see how she hadn’t seen it before. Alexandre Daalmans knew about the safe; Godfrey Norton paid regular visits to the Inner Temple despite not having been called to the bar and a gossiping ostler of the Serpentine Mews not being second in line to the throne; and what was happening to the Inner Temple at just this moment?

Why, it was being renovated; modernised; and there was a plan for a part of it pinned up all along Daalmans' west-facing wall, for of course, he was working on the project. And that was where they met; that was where Norton had made Daalmans give up the secret of the safe.

It was no surprise, really, that Godfrey Norton should betray Irene. Hadn’t Miss Adler sent her lover a letter attempting to break off their intimacy? Hadn’t she been accused of trying to scare Norton off? And hadn’t she admitted that Norton would hate what she was planning to do? But Holmes half remembered, half imagined Irene Adler locked in that tight and desperate embrace with Godfrey Norton, after their argument; she had caught just the barest glimpse of the two through the window, Miss Adler almost obscured by her companion’s dark bulk. Her face had been hidden in Norton’s shoulder. For some reason, what had made the most lasting impression in Holmes’ mind was how her right hand had grasped helplessly at the fabric of Norton’s jacket, a strange picture of desperation framed by the coolness of the room they were in—that and their muted voices, just audible through the window. _You must have doubted? Never_.

Godfrey Norton. Who was she? What was she? What did Irene even call her? Well— _Godfrey_ , obviously, but they couldn’t always have been on first name terms. With an unsteady feeling, Holmes supposed Godfrey must once have been _Mr Norton_ to Irene Adler. She could hardly have been a Miss. What had that ostler said? _Not what I’d call a gentleman, myself_ —

Oh.

In the quiet street, Sherlock Holmes stopped still, her bound chest slowly rising and falling. Around her feet, leaves skittered; she suddenly felt the nip of the breeze, and the heat of the sun, and the cold grip of the truth.

They had known.

That was what Godfrey Norton was, then: a curiosity worthy of the circus. The grooms and ostlers had all called her _he_ , of course—as if wary of catching something should they actually voice the truth—but now Holmes could decode the wry, sneering edge their voices had had.

They had all _known_.

And she—

That was what would happen to her, then. She would be peeled apart, looked into, and pronounced revoltingly funny. A parody of a man.

And if she stayed hidden, she would be just that; hidden, forever.

She didn’t want to be an Irene Adler, delicately playing off the bob of her bustle against the angle of her hat, swishing frothy skirts and made breathlessly ethereal by virtue of being actually breathless. Oh, the bandages were painful, but she’d worn a corset once, or someone called Violet had. It had been quite literally _once_ , too—the actual item had been an unspoken order disguised as a gift. By then, though she had still sported long hair and skirts, she had already been binding her breasts.

But she hadn’t wanted to stay hidden. She had wanted to wear trousers, and cut her hair short, and smoke cigarettes. She had wanted to put what she had felt was a very male brain to a very male course of study. (Her opinions regarding the male brain had changed at Cambridge—leaving her feeling unanchored, wondering what sort of brain she had in that case, if men were just as trivial as women). Secrecy had been necessary but it had never been the _aim_ , if there had been any aim beyond finding a home for herself in her own skin.

...where was she walking? Holmes stopped, frowned at the street around her, and realised she was heading back to Baker Street, even though she had made up her mind not to report back to Irene. Miss Adler, that was. Oh, damn—she hissed in her breath through her teeth in lieu of actually swearing, choosing another direction blindly and marching off down it, almost vibrating with a sudden and inexplicable fury.

She wasn’t a Miss Holmes. A _Miss_ was always in danger of mutating hellishly and unpredictably into a _Mrs_. The idea of being either made Holmes’ skin crawl. But every newspaper report and every book (bless Watson—but damn him) describing Sherlock Holmes and his extraordinary brain made her feel curiously outside herself, and if she didn’t quite know this man they were describing. Certainly, he acted like her, and he was—almost as brilliant (the newspapers, she felt, did not quite understand her methods, and therefore never represented them perfectly). He even had her name. But he certainly hadn’t spent seventeen years with the name Violet tacked onto him; he hadn’t ever almost suffocated from wrapping his chest around too tightly; he wasn’t familiar with the particular thrill of being called ‘sir’ for the first time; his gait had never been considered too masculine. His father had never been angry to discover that he could read Latin.

He wasn’t her, in short, and hadn’t lived her life. She was Sherlock Holmes. He was simply an image.

If Holmes had not been interrupted at just that moment, she might have laughed, high and confused, or she might have reeled with sudden nausea, sick with the bitter injustice of it all. 

“Mr Holmes!”

But she _was_ interrupted. Seconds away from dashing herself against the cliff face of her own incomprehensible anger, a familiar voice called her back. As ever, it was easiest to hook her out of her own mind by giving her a question to answer.

In this case, the question was: _what is_ she _doing here_? 

Holmes straightened, not having realised she’d sagged, and turned to see Irene Adler crushing propriety under her heel, leaning halfway out of a hackney carriage to wave her hand and call her name.

“Come quickly, I’ve been looking for you!” Miss Adler called. “I owe this driver my _life_ -savings.”

Holmes just stared for a moment. She wanted to rub a hand over her face, to mark the transition from—whatever had just happened to here, now, where she would be as disciplined and as unafraid as ever. She couldn't, of course; Miss Adler would catch the gesture. So she kept her composure instead, or at least faked her composure, and strode towards the carriage, adopting the air of one dryly amused by Miss Adler’s ever so American antics. 

But, “Get in,” Miss Adler said quietly, dropping all cheerfulness once Holmes was close enough to see how her mouth twisted grimly downwards. She disappeared into the carriage, and Holmes followed, taking the seat opposite her. There was the distant mutter of the coachman, the crack of a whip, and they were dragged onwards.

For a few seconds they were just silent, each knowing what wasn’t being said.

Holmes began to speak, saying, “I assume you—” Miss Adler’s hand flew up in the air, stopping her words in her throat.

“Answer me with either yes or no, and absolutely nothing else,” she said. “Godfrey?”

Their eyes met. Miss Adler’s were wine-dark. Holmes searched for any sign that she had been weeping, but found the rims of her eyes dry and unpinkened, her lashes neatly distinct rather than damply stuck together. “Yes,” Holmes said.

Irene Adler’s fingers—still in the air—curled delicately in on themselves, her grey gloves creasing. She closed her eyes for a moment. “Thank you,” she said calmly. Then, “ _Damn_ her.”

 _Her_. Holmes’ lips parted. Was that—quite legal in this game of unspoken secrets they were playing? “How did you, ah...come to suspect?”

“Godfrey has a key,” Irene said, “a motive.” She brushed her gloved fingertips to her lower lip. “And I had...a feeling. Alexandre had mentioned working on some huge project in London, and I was sure I'd seen something in the papers about the Inner Temple before. I didn't quite know what to do except ask somebody, so I went out into the street and made everyone I met think I was the most grotesque American they'd ever met—” She was acting, pushing herself a little too far. The role—that of laughably unconcerned _demimondaine_ —was cracking around the edges. Holmes didn't believe she'd done any such thing. It was a detail added to a character. “Anyway. I got nothing from accosting people on the street, so I went to the Inner Temple myself and asked to see my husband Godfrey Norton. The men there said no doubt he'd be around in the evening time, to visit Mr Daalmans like he did almost every day. So Alexandre knew about the compartment, and...Godfrey got it out of him—probably without Alexandre knowing, he’s so—so disconnected.” Holmes frowned. Irene seemed to feel her dissatisfaction with the the theory and looked away. “I know,” she said after a moment, just as calmly as she had said everything so far. “You’re going to point out that they had to meet up multiple times. And that Godfrey always reported back after meeting up with me. And that Alexandre’s in love with me, of course.” She sighed. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t state the obvious. I know what game Godfrey was playing.”

The truth hung between them like a sour stench in the air. A simple, unnerving chain of events. Holmes remembered the ease with which Irene’s name had made Daalmans open the door; she supposed Norton’s strategy was no different. Regular reports on Irene’s activities had made Daalmans talkative, excited—and eager, probably, to boast. ( _Ah, I have known her since 1886..._ ) Had he used that relieved and triumphant tone to tell Norton that he had fitted a hidden compartment into the walls of Irene Adler’s home?

Irene’s profile was unmoving save for a tic which jumped once, twice in her cheek, and was still. Whatever she was seeing outside of the window, she looked like she hated it.

“Not many people,” Holmes said, and then redressed her error; “not many _women_ react so logically when I have to confirm that they have been betrayed by their lover.”

Irene closed her eyes as if exhausted. “Not many people, no matter their gender, have ever called Godfrey my lover,” she murmured. “Regardless of what they suspect.”

“I abhor people who deny the facts before their eyes.” Against all expectations, Irene Adler turned her gaze back onto Holmes and smiled.

“Do you get the sense, when we talk, that we are having an enormous number of different conversations all at once?”

“Are you complaining, madam?” Holmes asked. The hum of laughter Irene gave made her mouth jerk upwards. She squeezed her shoulders in, almost shrugging, and smiled, though not in Holmes' direction. The expression faded slowly in the ensuing moments of silence, saddening. Holmes drummed her bare fingers on her knee and cleared her throat. “The carriage is, I assume, taking us to Mr—to the lodgings of your companion?” she asked.

“Mrs, actually,” Irene said. “Mrs Norton. She’s a widow, you see. And yes; you’re absolutely right. We are going to visit _Mrs Norton_ , who shall—” She sighed, suddenly, and very incongruously, as if it were bursting out of her lungs without any care for where in her sentence she was. Her eyes closed again. She seemed to take a moment to get over it. “Who shall not be in,” she finished neatly, straightening up again and sucking a nice deep breath down into her corseted lungs, cultivating a perfect smile. “I’m sure you don’t mind me inviting you along.”

“I still have to take your letters from you,” Holmes reminded her.

“Yes,” Irene Adler sighed, dropping her smile as if it disgusted her. Holmes felt faintly relieved to see it go. “You do indeed.”

For a while longer they sat in a silence which was neither uncertain, nor companionable, but truthful. Holmes sat back and unthinkingly calculated the speed at which they were moving, cross-referencing the way the wheels clacked on the cobbles with her mental map of London with the colour of the mud on the soles of Godfrey Norton’s shoes to judge the exact address of their destination. Irene returned to looking out of the window. 

“I should have worn my walking clothes,” she said eventually, the words stirring the air.

“Your suit?”

“One of them,” she said, mutedly wry, eyes sliding to Holmes’, whose mouth gave a faint twitch, but who looked away.

“They _are_ more practical,” she agreed quietly.

Irene shrugged and—Holmes blinked, glancing back to her—began to pinch the fingertips of her right glove. “Unless it’s cold. No, it’s not that.” She looked up, smiling starkly and rather viciously. “It's just that Godfrey's never seen me dressed as a man. I'd like to see her face upon realising.” She peeled off the glove with a businesslike air, freeing her long fingers and crumpling grey silk between them. Then she started on the next. Holmes watched. Ladies were not meant to take off their gloves in what counted more or less as the street, especially not when accompanied, _more or less_ , by an unfamiliar man. The idea of expressing either scandal or dry amusement occurred—but Holmes realised she didn’t want to do either. She wasn’t scandalised and she didn’t find it funny.

She watched.

Irene had little graphite stains on her small, slim fingers, and a larger smear across the side of her hand. The marks shone a dull, dark grey and informed Holmes that she was at least reasonably skilled as a sketch artist; she could tell how the side of her hand had pressed against the paper, and how she had smudged something with her forefinger and then not bothered to wipe away the marks, knowing that they would be covered by the gloves. Strange, for a woman who matched her secret safe to her mantelpiece. Perhaps she took pride in them, or enjoyed how curiously they illuminated the network of tiny lines and curlicues of her hands. Holmes looked up, to where Irene was watching her.

“Mr Holmes,” Irene said, and reached forward suddenly—

In truth, Holmes didn’t understand how it happened, which didn’t make sense. All Irene Adler did was grab her hand. That should have been perfectly comprehensible, because it was nothing but a movement of muscle and sinew, a displacement of air. Irene didn’t have to reach through miles or cross broken glass to do it; she merely had to put her hand out and clutch Holmes’ fingers between hers with a sudden ferocity.

She might as well have torn up the Bible with her teeth.

Irene’s fingers were hot against Holmes’ palm. She didn’t dig her nails in, but there was an urgency in her grip, as if she were trying to press some sort of secret message into Holmes’ skin. The air Holmes dragged sharply down into her lungs seemed, in contrast, icy cold, and she stared at where their hands were linked and warmth bled between them, trying to understand how the distance between two people could be so easily and abruptly closed.

Irene released her hand as abruptly as she had snatched it, and they both pulled back—but neither completely. Irene flicked back her hand at the wrist, fingers delicately curled; Holmes jerked her hand away and tightened it into a fist.

“I,” Holmes began, and, “I,” Irene tried at the same time, and they both fell silent, looking irritable. 

Slowly, Irene relaxed her wrist and elbow, and delicately uncurled her bare fingers once more. Holmes watched the movement, unable to stop herself. “What exactly,” she said, but didn’t finish the question—half because she was unsure how to, and half because Irene's fingertips were almost touching the back of her hand.

Holmes’ mouth was dry. Her fist unfolded slowly but unthinkingly—it was as if, this close, Irene's fingers held a sort of magnetism which urged Holmes to react, bypassing her mind and speaking straight to her muscles. Holmes remembered the press of her index finger at her crook of her elbow and realised she was not quite breathing.

She uncurled her fingers, tipping her open palm upwards. She felt like she was obeying an order Irene hadn't spoken aloud. They weren't touching. The tip of Irene's index finger came so close to the centre of Holmes' palm that Holmes couldn't think of anything but the absence of sensation, but they weren't touching.

The carriage came to a jolting stop, nearly tipping Irene over into Holmes’s lap. The horses whinnied plaintively. “Oh—” It was like cresting a wave. Everything crashed into everything else. Fingers clutched at fingers, twisting and grabbing. Irene scrabbled at the heel of Holmes’ hand with her nails, and Holmes’ fingers had closed automatically around Irene’s wrist; and then in the next second, they had snatched their hands back and straightened up. The carriage was still. Irene Adler reached for her gloves. There were graphite smudges on Holmes’ palm.

“Is this—”

“Yes. Godfrey’s house.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
>  **"la loge d’Irène"** \- "Irene's dressing room".
> 
>  **"Le corps d’une femme non-identifiée a été retrouvé dans les ruines..."** \- "The body of an unidentified woman was discovered in the ruins."
> 
>  **"Il pleut, et des femmes meurent."** \- "It's raining and women are dying."
> 
>  **"The era of brilliance"** \- Daalmans is pretty visionary, for all his Daalmansity. The first home to be electrified in Britain was a house called Cragside in 1881; the first newly-built home fitted for electricity was built in 1886. In both cases (I think), the decision was helped along by either the man of the house having some kind of electrical ability/fascination or having friends with a passion for electricity, so Irene—possessing money, skilled friends and a taste for the bizarre—is pretty well-situated to electrify her house, though it would be inconvenient and considered a distinctly strange choice. She would have been thought either very modern and interesting or a complete lunatic risking freckles, shocks and general madness. It really wasn't trusted, and was thought to be much too harsh and bright. (And of course, it was unreliable as hell, so enjoy the image of Irene's flat stare when her lamp goes out _again_ while she's trying to curl up with A Study in Scarlet). 
> 
> Daalmans claiming that electric light is thought to be "middle class" might be a bit questionable considering the sheer expense of early electric lighting, but of course in Britain, at least, class was (and in some respects still is) distinct from money. Irene has plenty of cash, but is about as far from upper class as you can get. Anti-electric lighters (this is a term I have just made up) probably would have thought her house _extraordinarily_ garish and showy. (It would have been different had she been upper class, of course—then she'd just be eccentric).
> 
> Regarding the lighting in the hotel, the theatre etc: electric lighting was slightly more widespread in that sort of commercial establishment, but was still by no means common.
> 
>  **"it was being renovated"** \- The Inner Temple really did undergo some huge renovations at the end of the 19th century, though I don't think it was electrified then.


	4. "Prove it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on dates/canon: Victor Trevor shows up (AND I CAN ADD A NEW PAIRING TAG hi). He's from The Adventure of the Gloria Scott (is it the Adventure? It's not much of an adventure, Holmes mainly just hangs out in Norfolk). As far as I remember there's no date given in canon and no agreed place for it in fanon chronology, just that it was Holmes' first official case. So I made up a date like the rebel I am. Anyway, the first scene takes place while Holmes is staying there perfectly innocuously and no one has yet died.
> 
> A note on sex: more of it here, little of it cheerful.
> 
> Enjoy.

**Donnithorpe, Norfolk, 1873**

Later in life, when she had to ask herself why she’d done it, the answer was always the same: arrogance, really, and loneliness, and the errors of judgement inevitable in nineteen year olds—and the fact that Victor Trevor spoke to her, but more confusingly and more compellingly, he smiled when he did it.

They sat in the in the warm, rainy quiet of the guest quarters in Trevor’s father’s home, and Holmes pretended to ignore Trevor’s fingers as they brushed circles at the back of her neck. She was at her desk, the chair creaking every time she moved. Trevor was beside her, watching her as she read—or as she looked at the pages of a book, at least. The words were hieroglyphics. She had forgotten what the title was.

Her body was a strange, hard thing. She had always known at much, and she knew it particularly keenly then as she stared numbly at the incomprehensible marks on the pages before her. Her body was very little to do with her, even while she stumbled around in it, constantly conscious of its limitations. Her body was a sort of oddity, strange-boned and awkward, much too tall and thin, more mountain range than man, perhaps more man than woman, but only just and only in certain areas; but here it was, being touched. 

Which was still not completely accurate, because it sounded so blameless and passive. The truth was that Trevor was touching it. Her skin. Her body. His fingers circled slightly more confidently now at the back of her neck, just below her short-clipped hairline, with a sort of searching intensity. It was as if he thought he could get through to _her_ just by touching her skin.

The idea that two people could touch just by touching was, like so many things, as nonsensical as it was agonisingly tempting.

“Holmes,” Trevor said. He sounded much more Northern when he was here, away from Cambridge, just like he was much more tactile. He touched her more easily when he trusted the locks on the doors, and could look out of the window and not see a soul. Holmes gave a jerky, half-fond smile.

“Trevor.”

“You haven’t turned a page in—”

“Thirteen minutes,” Holmes offered, quietly wry, tapping her fingers against the open pages.

“Dashed observant of you,” Trevor said, laughing and gripping the scruff of her neck as if she were a troublesome cat, making her blink and flush and accidentally smile and then—as if defiance of her own uncertainty—slam her book shut. She leaned her head back and stretched, making him pull his hand away. Her shoulders and neck clicked and complained as she unwound herself from her scholarly pose. “I might have known you’d only come to read my books,” Trevor added.

“Yes,” Holmes agreed, not sure what else there was to say to that. Then she turned so that she was sitting sideways in her seat, catching the hand which had been at the back of her neck and putting her other hand on his knee, and leant over to press their mouths together.

In Cambridge, they had only done this—kiss—in the dark, and only twice. They had both been stiff and uncertain, much more nervous kissing than they had been the first time they had stumbled to the sofa in Holmes’ rooms and between them guided Holmes’ hand between Trevor’s legs. Even now she felt Trevor tense up, the muscles in his leg tightening under her hand. She imagined him as a diagram in her books; Trevor being kissed, and Trevor being left well enough alone, the biological differences. She gripped harder, opened her mouth, knowing he would relax suddenly, as if stumbling and giving in. He did just as predicted, almost slumping, his free hand cupping her jaw.

The kiss was almost lazy, as if they were exhausted by the effort of having pushed their mouths together in the first place and were now wary of pushing too hard once they’d achieved some small success. Holmes had started it the first time, of course; Holmes had started everything; but Trevor had _thought_ about it first, staring at her mouth as she chattered about bee’s wings, sprawled on the floor of her Cambridge rooms. At first, she’d thought he wanted her to undo his trousers and take him in her mouth—and yes, he _had_ , it had transpired (she had stopped talking about bee wings and given a jerk of the eyebrows to convey a question and he had flushed and looked away to convey an answer) but after, he had kept looking. Staring, as if wondering.

She hadn’t kissed him then, of course; for one thing, she was suddenly unsure just how to close the gap between them, and for another, her mouth had tasted dreadful; but later, a few days later, she had cornered him in his rooms after dusk had fallen, and neither of them had pushed the other away.

Except.

“You,” Trevor said now, quietly, touching her throat again, feeling her pulse flicker under her skin, “you are quite—” He laughed, just a breath, and smiled helplessly. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Except.

“You are kissing me,” Holmes murmured, “or rather you are about to be.” A self-fulfilling prophecy, of course; she pushed her hand up his thigh and kissed him again, and this time he was leaning forwards before she reached his mouth, opening for her.

Except.

He was swollen, hard, pushing up against her palm, straining against his trousers. Her elbow bumped against the desk. He groaned into her mouth.

Except she could only do this because they weren’t touching at all.

Trevor was rubbing himself against the hand of—he thought—a brilliant young undergraduate, nineteen and slightly wicked, casual and cold and entirely, strangely shameless; not a handsome young man but a startling one. Sherlock Holmes was no one’s golden Adonis—but that probably helped. This wasn’t any Greek love or Platonic admiration or aesthetic pleasure. No one had ever written decadent poetry about this—one young man awkwardly groping another as they sat in creaky chairs in a little study in Norfolk, rain starting to patter on the window and a book full of dense, depressing philosophy on the table; no one wrote feminine rhymes about licking the taste of tobacco from the inside of Sherlock Holmes’ lip; no, with that sort of man, it was all flowers and mythology; and so this, what they were doing, didn’t count.

All of this was obvious to Holmes. She knew what Trevor saw, and who Trevor thought he was kissing. But she was locked inside her own body, unreachable, and Trevor wasn’t even coming close to her. “I want,” Trevor said, as they took a break for breath, the badly-shaven fuzz of his jaw scraping her cheek.

“Noted,” Holmes interrupted, squeezing—because it was easy, when she was lying, to be brazen. Trevor made a strangled noise, and Holmes grinned for a second and untangled their damp fingers to brace her other hand on his thigh. She leant over further, putting her mouth to his neck. It was easy to learn and remember sequences of actions; kissing his throat and touching his prick through his clothes at the same time always worked, but she had to be careful not to repeat it too often, lest he notice any obvious pattern to her spontaneous deviance.

“No,” he said, and she froze, and pulled back—but he grabbed her by the lapels of her jacket to haul her clumsily closer. Her heart thudded, just inches from his fingers. If he put his hands to her chest, he would feel the ridges of her bandages beneath her shirt—but he wouldn’t do that. Would he? No. Surely he didn’t think there would be anything there for him to appreciate. “Wait.”

“What?” she asked, eyes too wide.

“I want to touch you,” he said, too fast, like he was trying to get the words out before he panicked and shied away from them, and Holmes’ breath got stuck in her throat.

“I believe you already are,” she said, voice wrong, unsteady, and by the time she had said as much she was already doomed. She should have laughed, she thought desperately, as if the idea were absolutely unthinkable. Now she had admitted the possibility, and he would never let it go. “ _Trevor_.” What could she do? Pull away? No, she could only go forward, try to distract him, so she surged against him, trying to kiss all his impossible wants right out of his mouth. Her hand slid up his trouserleg again, finding where the fabric was tented and hot, where he tried to rise up into her hand.

“No,” he was gasping, as she squeezed him and stroked him, undid his trousers so she was touching him through his underclothes, kissed his neck, “no, don’t act like you want me to, ah, to shut up, I want to touch you, I want to, I want to taste you, your—your _cock_ , Holmes—”

The sound Holmes made was ripped right from her lungs, an animal whimper against the corner of Victor Trevor’s jaw. Suddenly, she was there rather than watching from inside her own head; she was on the edge of her seat, breathing in the scent of shaving soap, macassar oil, anxious young men, her leg against Trevor’s and her elbow knocking against the desk again. She’d have bruises. Trevor was still talking, about his mouth, her cock, his lips—

“—want you half way down my throat, I, I, God I know it’s filthy but I swear it’s all I think about sometimes, for God’s sake, Holmes, just let me—”

“Yes,” she said, the word stumbling and broken—his mouth, his throat, spit and semen and salt, shaving soap, stubble, his tongue on her, mouth around her all hot and wet and hard—

He pushed her hand away; his knees hit the floor in front of her and he grabbed between her legs; she came reeling to her senses with a hard gasp of breath.

“Christ, no,” she said, and stood up so quickly that her chair crashed backwards onto the floor, echoed, rolled, and was still.

Their ragged breathing underlined the sound of the rain as they stared at each other. A strand of hair had fallen into Trevor’s eyes. He stayed on his knees. Holmes’ mouth was open.

“Out,” she said finally, jerking the word out of her throat. Trevor unfolded himself slowly from the floor. The shocked hurt scrawled across his features was like a raw wound. He walked past her to the door of her room, and let himself out without a word. The door clicked. After a moment, Holmes crossed the room and turned the key in the lock.

Slowly, she found her cigarettes and lit one.

So it was very clear that she was mad.

Her hands were shaking, she noticed from a distance. Ash had fallen onto the floor. _Halfway down my throat_. There was a warm dampness between her legs, and she wondered hazily if she was bleeding. It was possible; her menses were irregular and unpredictable. She’d always believed it was evidence of some natural unwomanliness. Barren and hard and absurd, her body, giving nothing up. _God I know it’s filthy but_ —

Trevor wouldn’t guess what she was or wasn’t. He would think that she was incapable or unattracted to him. She could pass it off as another idiosyncrasy, she thought desperately, hopefully. She could say that she hated to be touched, or that she was never aroused—oh, of course, she realised, feeling a jolt of surprise as a line of text on female lubrication from a medical journal swam before her eyes. What was wrong with her today? It wasn’t blood between her legs.

The world came into focus when Holmes finished her cigarette. She lit a second with its glowing end before stubbing it out against the floorboards, leaving a dark, ashy mark which she couldn’t bring herself to feel apologetic about. She had no real memory of dropping to the floor, but there she was, sitting with her back against the upended chair, her knees up and spread. Her collar was rumpled, her skin flushed and prickling with sweat. She stuck her second cigarette in her mouth and pulled off her jacket with sudden, clumsy movements, throwing it across the room—and then she was too cold where she had previously been too warm, but she didn’t want to move to retrieve it.

Her head lolled back, cigarette nearly falling out of her mouth, and she closed her eyes as she wondered how quickly she could pack.

 _God I know_.

Smoke spiralled upwards for a long time. She drew another ashy mark, discarded another stubbed cigarette-end, and lit a third. Her breath kept shuddering in her chest, stumbling in her throat. She tried to concentrate on travel plans.

He had put his hand between her legs—just here. She repeated the motion, pressing her fingers against herself through her trousers. He had been—he had wanted to. To undo her trousers and...well, do the impossible. To reach her. Perhaps he would still want to reach her if...

She dragged smoke into her lungs and tried to imagine that he would be relieved if he knew. He would not have to consider himself a criminal. He would stop trying to make excuses. He would want her even more.

 _God I know it’s filthy_.

No, Holmes thought, unbuttoning her trousers slowly. The idea was ridiculous as her craggy, inhospitable body.

 _God I know it’s filthy but I swear_.

So it was better to imagine herself a man, better to imagine Trevor’s mouth around her, sucking, his hands on her bare thighs, and how warm it would be, his face flushed, mouth wet with her, fingers _inside_ , curling and coaxing and stroking her—

Trevor’s fingers, rubbing and urging, his face between her legs. She got herself caught on the hard edge of that thought, stumbled over it. A wave of hard muscular contractions rocked her, too soon and too sudden. Her mind flinched, and she lost her train of thought, forgot what had been exciting about the image; the notion fluttered and vanished. Pleasure sparked somewhere below in her body, but she was too busy staring after the vague idea to feel anything but a repulsed fascination for her body’s loss of control. She broke her cigarette between her fingers accidentally. It took her a moment to realise she was, at least technically speaking, in the throes of climax. By the time she had noticed, and was sure, it was ebbing away. Nothing felt and nothing lost.

She ripped her cigarette apart properly, one-handed and clumsy, feeling like she shouldn’t touch anything with the wet fingers of her right hand. Sprawled on the floor like something dropped there which had smashed, Sherlock Holmes threw the useless end of her cigarette across the room and pulled on the stubby remainder, her hair falling into her eyes. She pushed smoke out of her mouth and thought about train times and what she would do for the rest of the long vacation, which then spiralled messily into what she would do for the rest of her life. She might sit here, she thought. She might just sit in this locked room and never move again.

Outside, the rain was still rattling the window, spattering shadows across the room. 

 

**London, 1889**

“Heavens,” said Miss Adler, “you _are_ spry.”

Holmes jumped off the sill, landing neatly and with a hard thud on Godfrey Norton’s sitting room floor. The shiny floorboards beneath her feet squeaked a protest. She straightened up, reached up to close the window she’d just climbed through, and said, “Thank you.” 

Miss Adler—who was by now, in Holmes’ mind, _very firmly_ Miss Adler as opposed to Irene—quirked her eyebrows, as if it hadn’t been a compliment. She, of course, had swanned in the door and up the stairs, well known to Godfrey’s housekeeper—but even Irene Adler didn’t think there was much point in trying to smuggle Holmes in through the front entrance. She’d rushed to open the sitting room window for her instead, and watched her pull herself up. 

The sitting room was on the first floor. The ivy at the back of the building now looked distinctly worse for wear in parts, and Holmes had a streak of bright, bloody graze on the heel of her left hand, but it had been a relief to do something brutish and physical as scale a wall, her muscles giving a rewarding dull ache. It was proof that her body was back under her own control. The rough brick handholds had destroyed any traces of graphite and Irene Adler which might have clung to her fingers.

And, obviously, she could now search Godfrey Norton’s rooms, which was the whole point.

“Take the living room,” Miss Adler ordered, already gliding towards the door, being a chameleon. Holmes took a moment to tilt her head at how she had somehow altered herself between the carriage and her lover’s home. Out there, she had been ablaze with scandal; in here, she was small, classically confined, and very rich. It was hard to imagine the glossy bronze and blue woman in front of her snatching someone’s hand as if trying to save them (or herself) from drowning. It was also hard to imagine her threatening the Prince of Wales. “I’ll search the bedroom. She won’t have hidden them so well we can’t find them.”

“We aren’t searching separately,” Holmes informed her, striding over and indicating with a wave of her hand that Irene should take the lead.

“No?”

“You’ll forgive me if I would rather keep me in my sight until you hand over the letters and photograph.”

“Do you mistrust everybody?” Miss Adler murmured, stopping as Holmes drew level with her, which forced Holmes to stop too. “Or am I particularly honoured?”

“I imagine you would prefer to come to your own conclusions. Lead on.”

Miss Adler’s dark pink mouth curved. Holmes carefully avoided looking down at her own bare hands. The marks were gone. There was no point checking again, no matter how she felt the urge—no matter how sweat prickled on her palms where Irene Adler had put her fingers, like her skin itself remembered.

Not that there was anything to remember. The interaction had been, in essence, little more than an over-friendly handshake. 

“The bedroom's just through here,” Miss Adler said, turning and leading the way, looking as if she were floating across the floor of a ballroom rather than preparing to ransack her lover's bedchamber.

Godfrey Norton’s rooms—she lived in a small but fashionable apartment, suitable for an entrepreneurial bachelor (which she wasn’t, really)—were as dark and smoothly masculine as she was. When Miss Adler opened the bedroom door, Holmes was utterly unsurprised to find that it held the strangely subterranean feel of many single men’s bedrooms. Time and air moved sluggishly inside it. The deep ruby curtains hadn’t been opened, casting everything into bloody, lazy shadow. The heavy oak wardrobe loomed over everything, but the wide, squat bed fought for dominance over the room, and altogether the furniture in general seemed crammed-in and too large. The wallpaper was a dank, solid dark red, and there was the warm scent of stale smoke from wall to wall. Holmes could tell from the wrinkle of Miss Adler’s nose that she disapproved of Norton smoking in the bedroom.

Of course, the letters and photographs weren’t there.

Holmes knew it immediately. Norton hadn’t been in the room since the night before last; the slight crust on the seal of her macassar oil suggested as much, as did the full but stagnant water jug. Had it not been for the empty space beside the washbasin, Holmes would have immediately called off their investigations and suggested they either search another room or consider the idea (much more likely) that Norton hadn’t even returned to her rooms after stealing Miss Adler’s letters.

That empty space, however, was horribly compelling.

Where was Norton’s razor? Holmes stared dumbly at its complete and utter absence, desperately confused, a creeping sense of wrongness making its way down her spine. Was Godfrey Norton simply stupid? _She_ kept a razor visible at all times, though it was of little use for anything besides occasionally opening her correspondence.

And then there was the Bates' Frizzetta hair lotion (“keeps the hair in curl”), which gleamed quietly next to a bottle of macassar oil as if it had every right to be there; as if Godfrey Norton could do anything with it, when her hair was as short as Holmes’ own. A jewellery box sparkled incongruously before the mirror. What was the woman—what was Norton thinking?

“Mr Holmes.” Holmes snapped herself out of it, turning sharply back to Miss Adler, who had already crossed the room to look for what she wouldn’t find. She had her back to Holmes, bent over the little table beside Norton’s bed to search through it. Her posture was curious; one rarely saw fashionably dressed women bending over anything. Corsets made it difficult, and manners made it forbidden. In the thick reddish light, her dress had turned bruise purple.

“They’re not in here,” said Holmes. “Norton hasn’t been here since last night, which I suspect means she hasn’t been home since she committed the theft.”

“I’m not sure she committed a theft. Come here,” Miss Adler said, her voice curiously distant.

Holmes did, and leaned over her shoulder to look at what was inside the bedside table’s drawer.

Paper. Not the letters—but sketches. Outlined in dark grey were the simple lines of a room; a stage; seats which half-encircled it; and its quarry, the faceless figure of a woman at the center of the stage. Each page—slowly, Irene Adler lifted them out of the drawer, leafing through them—held a different view, some looking from behind the woman’s shoulder, some as if from the perspective of an audience member. It wasn’t the Théâtre d’Or; Holmes could tell as much from the shape of the auditorium. Miss Adler’s hands were shaking.

The bottom sketch, which Miss Adler left in the drawer as if unwilling to touch it, was different. Its predecessors were daydreams; this was something like a proto-blueprint, notes scribbled along the edges in English—and in French, in a different hand and different ink. It was Daalmans’ cramped script.

“She is rebuilding,” Miss Adler said quietly. She lifted her head slowly. Her face was pulled tight and so close to Holmes’ own that Miss Adler’s slow, shuddering outward breath tickled Holmes’ lower lip. She could feel how tightly Miss Adler’s muscles were tensed, as if she was trying to hold herself inside her own body. “She wants to rebuild the Théâtre, she and Alexandre. That’s what they meet up for, not to plot about my letters. She didn’t...perhaps Godfrey didn’t take them.”

She didn’t sound relieved. In fact, there was a thick, muddy current of horror in her usually crystalline voice. But there was no time to ask why, because far below them the front door had just shuddered open. 

They froze, and Irene groaned, “Oh for God’s sake, she can’t find _you_ here,” almost into Holmes’ mouth.

Distantly, Godfrey Norton’s voice was just audible as a low rumble, as her housekeeper informed her that Miss Adler had called, and was waiting.

Miss Adler drew a hard breath and shook herself into action. She elbowed Holmes aside and flung herself towards the window, wrenching the curtains apart and reaching for the window fastenings so that Holmes could leave—but Holmes was already diving for the looming oak wardrobe and stepping inside. With the sketches still in hand, Miss Adler dropped the curtains back to where they had been, washing the room in shadow again, and pushed the doors closed to seal Holmes into darkness. She left a crack through which Holmes could see. For a few frozen seconds, the view was blocked by her skirts, and then she pushed herself back across the room to replace the sketches.

Holmes’ breathing was loud. She ignored it, and crouched down to set her eye to the single stripe of visibility. Norton’s suits and shirts whispered and rustled behind her, swaying as if trying to tap her on the shoulder. She wet her lips, and waited.

Someone had taken those letters. Norton was still a possibility. And now she was coming up the stairs, her tread heavy. “Irene?”

 

Irene wasn’t ready. Rebuilding the Théâtre?

It was like escaping one cage, only to discover she was inside another, bigger enclosure, constructed without her knowing—kept secret because it was meant to be a welcome surprise. Or did they know that she would hate it? Was that why they hadn’t told her?

She wasn’t ready. Godfrey was coming up the stairs and she was smashed, her personality blown apart, her mind reeling. “I’m in the bedroom,” she called as she shoved the sketches back into the drawer, so Godfrey wouldn’t think anything was amiss. She breathed deep, nervous, and cast around desperately for a face to show her lover.

When Godfrey opened the door, Irene’s eyes were rimmed with silvery tears. 

“Oh, my sweet girl,” Godfrey said, “what on earth has happened?”

For a moment, Irene felt like she could just stare at Godfrey forever, tongue heavy with all sorts of things she certainly wouldn’t ever say. The possibility of staying silent stretched horrible, and she knew that she had to speak, or lose her entire act. “Another robbery,” she breathed. Godfrey surged forward and snatched her up into her arms like she was trying to lift her right out of the real world and hold her, safe, to her chest.

Pressed there, Irene could feel the steady, rapid thud of Godfrey’s heart. She felt a thick, sludgy dread dripping down into her own stomach, cold and thick and unstoppable.

“Was anyone hurt?” Godfrey asked, peeling Irene away from her slightly. Irene allowed it, ragdollish in Godfrey’s arms as she tended her loose curls gently away from her face, staring anxiously into her eyes. Irene licked her lips. Her forearm was still against Godfrey’s chest.

“They found it,” Irene said, “they took it,” and Godfrey’s heart jackhammered, sending vibrations through Irene’s bones.

Oh.

Irene slowly peeled away and stared into Godfrey’s eyes, trying to find something there which would react to her, receive her, some distant spark telling her that she was wrong. She found nothing.

“Oh no,” Godfrey said. Surprise was a difficult thing to fake. Godfrey didn’t succeed.

They looked at each other. Irene waited for the inevitable as surely as if she’d seen the script beforehand. She felt distantly sick, standing there slack-jawed and still, just about, in Godfrey’s arms.

Godfrey recited: “Irene, it was only—”

“It wasn’t _only_ anything!” she cried. It hurt her throat. It made Godfrey stumble back as if Irene had shoved her.

Irene wondered if, after that, Godfrey could possibly think that Irene didn’t know—but then denial was a powerful thing, and arrogance, and Godfrey, too. Godfrey was so practical it came right back around to naivete. And Godfrey didn’t know anything about her. The silence rustled, and then settled again like snow. Irene slowly uncurled her fingers from the fists she had tightened them into. Godfrey caught her elbow. “No,” Irene said quietly, dizzily. “Stop it. Please.”

“Irene...”

“I asked you to stop it.”

“What on earth do you want me to stop?”

“Stop misunderstanding me.”

“Irene, for God’s sake,” Godfrey was clutching at her hands like she was begging her for something. Absolution, probably. Dear God; she had wanted to love and be loved, not start her own religion. “You could never really have done it. Did you really think you could, could—did you really think that? This was always going to happen. If they hadn’t taken them, you would have been put away. You _can’t_ blackmail a _Prince_.”

“It wasn’t going to be blackmail,” Irene said, her voice soft and deadly. Her heart was slamming itself against her rib cage, hammering and shuddering in her chest like it was screaming to be let out. “Blackmail implies he’d have any kind of say in it. He hasn’t got anything I want anymore, so I don’t see why I should bargain. I was just going to go to print.”

“What is _wrong_ with you?” The words resonated in the air like a harsh slap. 

They stared at each other, a bitterness opening, stretching and then yawning between them. Irene took a few steps backwards. The silence was ragged.

“What,” Irene said. She rolled the word up into a disdainful little pebble and dropped it into the silence like a challenge.

For a long time, it went unanswered. Godfrey’s face was dark and thunderous and somehow lost. Her upper lip trembled. She breathed hard, looking like she was chewing on her own conscience. Irene reached out blindly to one side, curling her fingers around the bedpost, clinging on.

“Ever since that bloody fire,” Godfrey said finally, her voice low and crumpled, full of a sort of trodden-on pain, dull and hateful, “I have, I have missed you so much.”

“I’ve been here,” Irene whispered. Her breath was stinging her own lips. Her heart seemed to be pumping something thick and black and choking around her body.

“Hardly.”

“How dare you.”

“Because you—I haven’t—my God. I haven’t seen you since. You haven’t been the same since.”

“Don’t be so stupid.”

“Don’t,” Godfrey said, her teeth gritted, “be like _this_.”

“I had a life before that, Godfrey,” Irene said. “I had a life before you. And I have a life now which is _mine_. Obligations, plans, which are nothing to do with you; and now they’re ruined. Can you hear yourself? My God, can you even comprehend the idea of something _not_ relating to the Théâtre? To you?”

“I’m saying what I’ve seen, and don’t pretend that I wasn’t around to see it; don’t pretend that I didn’t look after you. You were never like this before—”

“We weren’t talking about this, we were talking about how he just won’t—”

“—never this _calculating_ —”

“—he left me for dead before you even knew me, and now he sends people to break into my house and stop me in the street and threaten me because I—”

“—accounting all these little wrongs against you, meting out your little punishments, never forgiving anything, never forgetting anything, it’s pathetic, Irene—”

The words welled up in Irene’s throat on a tide of bitter victory. They tasted true. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said.

“All I don’t know is why I still give a damn about you,” Godfrey snarled, and threw the door closed behind her. Her footsteps echoed on the stairs. Irene’s breaths were loud and dry in the dank, empty room. She waited to see if a sob would jerk in her chest. Nothing happened.

 

In the wardrobe, Holmes’s breathing came slow and hard, moist in the enclosed space. She watched Miss Adler through the crack between the doors, unwilling to intrude upon what now had the eerily calm air of a battlefield after the fact. Miss Adler had turned, presenting Holmes with her narrow, straight back and the glossy black coils of her hair. She was still clutching the bedpost, her other hand at her waist.

Holmes supposed it must be difficult to so successfully use one’s emotions as a battering ram.

Holmes didn’t have long to wonder how Miss Adler could do it—how she could afford to do it—because she was approaching, fully restored to herself. Holmes shook away confused admiration and stood up, backing away from the doors slightly—and found herself pressed up against velvet.

She blinked, and reached out, finding herself with a handful of artfully crumpled skirt, hanging there in Godfrey Norton’s wardrobe like it had every right to be there. Just then, she was flooded with bloody light, blinking, and Miss Adler stood in front of her, mouth slightly parted, cheeks high with colour. 

“Impressive,” Holmes said.

“Thank you,” Miss Adler said, and looked from Holmes to what Holmes was holding onto; the skirts of a half-mourning dress, crushed velvet as dull and rich as red wine. Holmes crumpled her fistful of skirts for a second and then let go. “She’s not quite what one might expect,” Miss Adler said, a grim edge to her voice.

“No. She isn’t.”

“Quickly now. Though I don’t think she’ll be back too soon—she can’t abide having to come grovelling.”

Miss Adler stood back to allow Holmes to climb past her, and Holmes again avoided the urge to wipe her hands off on her thighs, as if dresses were catching. She crossed to the window. Miss Adler took the blind, Holmes took the window fastenings, and they both took grateful lungfuls of cold air, the breeze snapping across their cheeks. “She took them,” said Miss Adler, raising her voice over the wind, but only slightly. “She really took them.” A black ringlet of her hair was blown across her face, bouncing against her cheek. “Her heart went into a frenzy the moment I mentioned there having been a theft.”

“You told her you had a compromising photograph. You didn’t mention the existence of any letters?”

“Not once.”

“And yet though you spoke about _it_ , she spoke about _them_. So: we have our thief, we simply lack our stolen property.” The last word was pulled tight with effort as Holmes braced her other hand on the sill and pulled herself up in one neat movement, bandages giving one sharp dig as she breathed in. She plucked off her hat and dropped it down to the garden, to spare herself having to navigate housebreaking in a top hat once more. Then her eyes went from Miss Adler to the door Godfrey Norton had slammed shut, hard enough to echo. “You would oblige me by not staying here.”

“I don’t know why you think I would. I’m meeting you in the carriage. Now _do_ get out of the window, Mr Holmes.”

*

_And now he sends people to break into my house_.

Holmes dropped her head back against the seat and sighed, fingers twitching for want of a cigarette. She stared up at the roof of the carriage, not feeling guilty so much as irritated with herself. It wasn’t Irene Adler’s fault, but she had been the catalyst. In her presence—or even out of her presence, knowing she was somewhere doing something—things in Holmes had started to grate against each other. She felt out of step with herself. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. It was the first time in a long time.

She checked her hands for graphite.

Miss Adler’s hand had been hot, small, damp, possessing a lovely feverishness, but that wasn’t really the point. The touch hadn’t been sensual; it had just been a touch, graphic in its sheer, snatching physicality. Holmes didn’t know if Irene Adler had been trying to reach her or just trying to reach anybody. She didn’t know why she’d responded. But there were hurried footsteps outside now, footsteps fast becoming familiar, and Holmes welcomed the excuse to close the lid on that particular unnerving array of thoughts.

There was a murmur outside and then the carriage door rattled, opened, and admitted Irene Adler in a burst of azure and a puff of French perfume. Holmes automatically pulled back so that she could take the seat opposite without her skirts catching awkwardly on anything—women on their way in and out of carriages were embarrassingly ungainly things—but instead, she sat down beside Holmes in a gentle thud of numerous skirts, and slumped back against the seat much as Holmes had just been doing.

“I directed the driver towards Baker Street,” she said.

“I heard.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No; it makes sense.”

Holmes prepared to ask for quiet in which to think, but Miss Adler didn’t speak. It almost threw her off, and she waited for a moment longer than was really sensible before settling into the fact that Miss Adler was apparently willing to leave the quiet where it was for the time being. They stared forwards in a slack-jawed sort of silence for a few minutes, the carriage wheels bouncing on the cobbles. 

Holmes thought.

This mess with the letters and the photograph was distracting. It had distracted her, in fact, horribly. The case at the heart of this matter was that of the Théâtre—and Marceline Beauclerc—and Irene Adler. The former contents of her safe was political dynamite, certainly, and its unknown whereabouts a threat—but a distraction was a distraction.

Distractions could be intentional. Distractions could be crucial. The contents of her safe—

The shift was tectonic and horrible, Holmes’ mind grinding and twisting until suddenly her mental landscape was alien enough to make her stagger over it and reel at how obvious it had been, how absurd it was that she’d taken hours, hours to realise it. “No,” she said, still staring at the opposite wall of the cab, not seeing it in the slightest. “Oh, of course not.”

“Pardon?”

“The contents was entirely irrelevant. It was only ever a question of buildings, engineering and _you_.”

“What?”

“Those sketches you made, the plans of the theatre, where are they?” Holmes said suddenly, her voice tense with expectation. Miss Adler stared at her as if she’d gone completely mad. Perhaps she had.

“Well, here,” Miss Adler said. To her credit, though she asked, “Why?” she did so while leaning down and pulling her skirts to undo the buttons of her tall right boot, so that she could pull out what had been hidden between her stocking and the boot leather.

“I need to compare them with the plan Alexandre Daalmans keeps on his wall. Why didn’t you tell me he worked on the theatre earlier?”

“Because dear Alexandre gets his sticky fingers into everything I do sooner or later, Mr Holmes. If I had to recount all of what he’s done or tried to do for me I’d run out of a breath.”

“How attentive of him,” Holmes murmured, wetting her lips, feeling anticipation seem to flicker under her skin as she opened out the pages and held them unfolded over her lap. Miss Adler’s copies weren’t as geometrically perfect as Daalmans’—few things could be—but they were recognisably similar. Holmes leafed through the layers, until she came to the paper on which Miss Adler had approximated the basement level—and stopped. Smiled. “These are wrong,” she said, sounding triumphant.

“They are not _wrong_ ,” Miss Adler scoffed, her voice slightly muffled; she was still wrestling with the buttons of her boot, bent double.

“No, they are most certainly wrong. Daalmans either changed his mind or lied to you, and I suspect I know which is more likely.” At this Irene Adler shot up, her cheeks flushed. She dropped her skirts back into place.

“Explain.”

“On his plan, there are other rooms here, on the lowest level...” Holmes shoved her hand inside her jacket suddenly, grabbing a pencil from her inner pocket. Irene gripped the side of the paper to hold it straight, tugging it over onto her lap too, while Holmes traced the outline of the missing subterranean rooms, just behind a square obliquely marked _d r_. She sketched in quick, sharp lines.

“No,” Irene said suddenly. “I remember those lines—some of them, anyway. They were rubbed out rather vehemently. Those rooms were there in the original building, but they couldn’t be renovated.”

“You’re sure?”

Irene Adler’s breath stirred Holmes’ collar, and Holmes stared down at what she’d just drawn, tapping the pencil gently against the lines representing the corridor which linked the mess of small rooms. Slowly, Irene reached over, taking the pencil from between Holmes’ fingers. Jolted by the carriage, her new lines were less sure, but she darkened the outline of a thin, meandering corridor. “No, actually. At first, Godfrey thought they could be used for storage space, and Alexandre was always trying to convince her—no, no, it’s impossible, it’s useless, they’re rotten through—but does he strike you as a man who says things are impossible often?”

“By no means,” Holmes said. “A man that dedicated to electric lighting takes supposed impossibility as a challenge. Allow me a shot in the dark, if you will: something happened to change Mrs Norton’s mind.”

“Yes,” Irene said immediately, her voice full of creeping dread. “Godfrey gave up on them when a part of the floor down there collapsed. But...”

“But if anyone could engineer the collapse in just the right way...”

“Alexandre could.” Holmes had thought that would be enough; Irene turned her glowing, drawn face upwards in a way which suggested she understood, meeting Holmes’ gaze with wide eyes. But, “Why?” she asked, as if unsure whether she wanted to hear the answer.

“Oh, really, Miss Adler,” Holmes snapped, snatching the pencil from her fingers. “18ème arrondissement, was it not? Rue Baudelique, close to the intersection with the Boulevard Ornano.” She screwed her eyes shut, her mind suddenly dropping beneath the city levels of Paris, a whirlwind of maps and schematics searing and swirling behind her eyelids before her eyes flew open again and she scored a number of sharp lines across the plan, the last so rough it ripped the paper. “The local sewage system. A rough approximation. I draw your attention, Madam, to this sewer in particular, and the proximity to this room here—by no means an intersection, but—”

“Oh, this is absurd!”

“Why do you trust him?”

“I don’t trust him,” Irene hissed, suddenly venomous, “I just don’t want it to be true.”

They were pressed tight against each other, the plan of the subterranean areas of the theatre spread out over both their laps. Irene’s teeth were gritted, her face wan and angry. Gradually, her breathing slowed and her jaw unstuck. Holmes found herself doing the same, though she hadn’t realised she’d tensed up in the first place. “My God,” Irene said quietly, staring at the plan. “My God, do you honestly think Alexandre built a, a secret passage to get in, light a fire and try to burn his own creation down?”

“No,” Holmes said, stabbing the room marked _d r_ with her pencil. “Not precisely. Do you know what this stands for, Miss Adler?”

“No. I remember it being on Godfrey’s plan, though.”

“ _D R_. Dynamo room,” she said. “The location of the generator which provided power to the theatre. And he, of course, was in charge of electrifying the whole place. He didn’t have to light anything, Miss Adler. He only had to ensure that the wiring was installed faultily—or rather, to his exact specifications, because I imagine he would have been devastated had it lit up at the wrong moment. And then he simply flicked a switch.”

And tried to ignite something, anything. To create some kind of fitting resolution to the problem of being obsessed with a woman who felt nothing for him. No, more than that; what had he said about hotel foyers? _It is all a theatrical production...one needs to light the performers in just the right way._

Perhaps the murder had been a matter of staging.

Beside her, Irene Adler breathed out slowly, her whole frame deflating, tension loosening. It was far from relaxation. “You’re saying the Théâtre was a murder weapon.”

“A murder weapon which destroyed itself in the course of the actual attempt, while the murderer in question fled. Efficient, isn’t it?”

“Efficient. Yes. Oh, _damn_ —...I can’t stand this. Driver, stop the carriage!” Irene shoved the plans off her lap and into Holmes’, one sheet drifting to the floor of the carriage. She snatched at the door and wrenched it open while the carriage was still in the process of rocking to a stop. Holmes shot to her feet, standing in the doorway and watching her as she strode a few steps away, keeping her back to the carriage, her shoulders thrown fiercely back.

With her cloak and her dress fluttering in the wind, snapping around her, she resembled a flickering gas flame in the middle of the street. Her hat was being nearly blown off. As Holmes watched, she brought her left fist to her mouth, her other hand clutching at her own waist as if having trouble breathing.

Holmes ignored the few people on the street pretending not to stare and descended from the carriage. She drew close, holding out her arm for support, wary lest Irene go crashing to the floor. In response, Irene gave her a look filthier and more bruised than the cobbles, and Holmes realised she had taken the movement as a demand, not an offer. She dropped her hand.

“Prove it,” Irene said.

“We’ll need to go to your house.”

“My _house_.”

“It would be better to show you than—”

“1886,” Irene said, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders, staring up at Holmes with her hair streaming in the wind. “Alexandre was trying to convince Godfrey that the cellars were useless in 1886. So if you’re right, Mr Holmes, this man has wanted to close me up in a coffin of his own design and burn me to death almost since he met me. That’s efficient to you. And now you’re telling me, I assume, that he’s done the same thing to my house. And you want me to go meekly along into the unknown with you not because you don’t have the time to explain, but because you desire control. Don't you dare say that. I won’t do it. Give me _proof_.”

Holmes had stopped ignoring the other people on the street and started just not noticing them. “You discovered the safe empty and vacated the premises just minutes before we arrived.”

Irene looked up at her with that familiar expression of exhausted fear, the _how do you know this?_ expression. And then she screwed up her face, fighting against it, and finally spat out defiantly, “The ink was wet,” as if trying to show Holmes up for a fraud by deducing her deductions.

“Agreed. And your house was not on fire.”

“What?”

“It’s your _safe_ , Miss Adler,” Holmes explained, drawing closer, lowering her voice and trying to push her words forwards, waiting impatiently for the moment they would connect with Irene’s mind and mean something to her. “The bottom panel moves almost imperceptibly. A design fault, perhaps; very well, but design faults are hardly characteristic of your home.”

“You...”

“You could hardly expect me not to investigate. It’s a switch, Miss Adler, just like the switch that failed to kill you last year; he’s wired it so that the only way to keep the circuit unbroken is to keep weight on the bottom panel, pushing it down. Release it and it will move gradually upwards until it triggers a connection, sparks the lights, and starts a fire.” Let it be right, she thought, too giddy to realise she was hoping that Irene Adler had been living inside a trap for months. Let it be right. It was uniquely elegant. It made sense, which was more than could be said for so much of the past few days. “I suspect Daalmans was complicit in the theft. He let slip the location of the safe, or perhaps he even suggested that Norton should take the letters—but the actual theft didn’t matter to him. He only cares about engineering and architecture and _you_ , Miss Adler.”

Irene closed her eyes for a moment and then turned her face away from Holmes, staring almost dazedly at the street around them, which began to filter back into Holmes’ consciousness, too. They were being stared at, caught as they were—a man and a woman (apparently) engaged in furious, low conversation after having stumbled out of an enclosed carriage whose driver was still frowning uncertainly at them, waiting to be paid. Holmes stepped back, allowing Irene space for her disbelief.

“You can’t possibly know...”

“I can.”

“Well. Thank God I didn’t leave it empty,” she said finally, her words slick with bitterness.

Holmes stilled. “What?”

Irene turned her face slowly back to Holmes as realisation slowly dawned upon both of them. Her eyebrows were raised, her face twisted by some confused, wide-eyed expression, and slowly—it seemed—she parted her lips in an unspoken question. Holmes stared back and gave the smallest shake of her head. “Oh my God,” said Irene, “did you—”

“It was empty when I found it, but I weighed it down...”

“But if you’re right, and if someone emptied it before, then—” They were striding towards the carriage without having conferred, nearly elbowing each other to get there as quickly as possible. “Fetch a hansom, it will be quicker,” Irene snapped, as she delved frantically in her purse for the carriage driver’s fare.

Holmes was sprinting into the street to hail a cab before Irene had finished her sentence, snatching at the reins of the horse rather than waste time yelling for the driver to halt. She had to dive out of the way, grabbing the side of the cab, as the animal whinnied and reared to a stop. The cabbie yelled something obscene and raised his whip, but changed his mind when Holmes snapped, “Five shillings to take me to the Serpentine Mews in ten minutes,” and hoisted herself up into the body of the cab.

“ _Wait_!” The shout made Holmes grab the side of the hansom and lean out over it to see Irene Adler trying to reach them before the driver could land his whip on the horse.

Holmes pushed open the doors and held out her hands. Irene snatched at them and dragged herself up, just as the whip crack and the carriage rocked and clattered forwards at high speeds The plans flew from Holmes’ lap and scattered across the street; the open doors clattered and caught Holmes’s shin with a loud crack. Irene’s breath was hot against Holmes’ ear, her gloves slippery against Holmes’ skin, her skirts spilt across most of the seat.

“That’ll be extra!” the driver yelled down at them, going ignored.

“Are you quite sure?” Holmes snapped, sounding almost angry.

“Yes,” Irene said. She was out of breath, her cheeks flushed, a patina of sweat shimmering on her brow, and she seemed to radiate a furnace-like heat. “Yes, I won’t run away.”

*

As it happened, neither of them had five shillings on them, much less extra.

Though her breaths were loud and ragged and her skirts conspired to trip her, Irene somehow managed to very nearly keep up with Holmes as they fled down the street, away from the driver screaming his threats at them as he tried to force his exhausted horse onwards, and towards Briony Lodge, which stood squarely in the distance, silent and smokeless.

Irene hammered on the door and then snatched a key out of her chatelaine bag, shoving it in the lock and wrenching the door open. Beth was in the hall, stopped short in her mission to answer the knock. “Ma’am?”

Irene shook her head, too breathless to answer as she and Holmes tumbled inside. Holmes, her heart hammering and her own breaths coming short, slipped by Irene and pushed forwards in the direction of the sitting room, but even sweat-sodden and gasping, Irene didn’t rest in the hallway. From the slithering whisper of skirts just behind her, Holmes could tell she was following.

Holmes shoved the sitting room door open with a crash, and ran to the bell-pull, closing her hand around the cord so tightly that her fingernails bit into her palm. She yanked it, and seemed to experience several things at once: the empty safe, the electrical flicker far above like the wing of a gaudy yellow bird; the scream.

And then the whooping sound of the curtains going up in flame.

Irene was still screaming in the doorway, over and over, a protracted and horrible sound which Holmes saw her physically muffle, slamming her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide—and then she was lurching out of the room, footsteps receding, then inaudible under the crackle of the flames. The heat was already pouring onto the left side of Holmes’ face. The safe itself had started to smoke.

Holmes fled the sitting room in Irene’s footsteps, but she had disappeared. Chasing her wasn’t an option. Irene Adler would save herself. That much was a given. 

After not even a heartbeat of hesitation, Holmes headed in the opposite direction to the one Irene must have taken, pushing deeper into the heart of the house, heading inwards and downwards.

Her shoes slammed against the floorboards and her breath rasping in her throat as she took thick, smoky lungfuls of air, shoving herself onwards—groping at walls to propel herself, ducking through doorways. With a snarl, the fire broke through the panelling on the wall just behind her. Holmes didn’t look back. The blaze was travelling within the walls. It had sparked in the wiring. The house was poisoning itself, spilling fire through its veins.

God, Daalmans had the mind of a poet, she thought; God, she’d like to see him swing for it.

She almost missed the staircase she was looking for, stumbling against the wall and trying to cough out smoke. To get to it, she had to wrench open a door which seemed to suggest that nothing more than a cupboard was hidden behind it, but Holmes could recognise the door to a servant’s staircase by now.

It led downwards.

Smoke flooded out, thicker than ever, and Holmes reeled back at first, gasping for clean air—as if there was any. Her bandages were slick with either blood or sweat; probably blood, she thought, judging by the heat—but then, everything around her was on fire. She grinned, or grimaced, face spasming with it, and she threw herself down the staircase.

It was less like running and more like falling. The smoke obscured the bottom of the staircase, leaving Holmes to hope that she wasn’t heading for a wine cellar. She stumbled when she found level ground, pain rocketing up her leg as her ankle wrenched, but the smoke cloying in her mouth and nostrils left absolutely no room for fear or doubt or anything but blind persistence. She opened the door by putting her weight behind her shoulder and shoving.

The dynamo room hummed, hazy with smoke but clearer than the staircase. It was a horrible wonderland of spinning, grinding metal. Behind the dynamo itself, which rolled with a hectic whine in the middle of the room like a chained dog vibrating and growling against its restraints, the switchboard loomed against the wall. Holmes took a breath, knowing it wasn’t the fresh air it felt like, and ran past the wailing dynamo to the switchboard, squeezing her stinging eyes closed for a second as she braced herself against it, her head swimming. How long did she have?

Above, something crashed, answering her question.

Holmes’ eyes flew open, and she started slamming down switches, wrenching them downwards in rows with loud clangs of metal on metal, ignoring how uncomfortably warm they were against her hands, and refusing to entertain the possibility of the switchboard itself going up in flames. She was having to claw oxygen out of the air, the switches swimming in front of her eyes, but finally they were all down, the power to the house shut off. 

Holmes sagged against the switchboard and then slithered downwards. It was easier to breathe there. She should move. She needed to move.

If she died in such a sensationalist manner, Mycroft might not be able to prevent an autopsy or make the proper arrangements to avoid any press speculation. Her work would be ruined. Her forensic advances would be tainted. Irene Adler’s case against Daalmans would be overshadowed and fall by the wayside. Watson would know.

She dragged in a lungful of smoke as if it would help and shoved herself forwards on her hands and knees, clawing her way to the door of the dynamo room. The crashing, whining sounds of the house devouring itself had merged into one long snarl, crashing and popping, seeming not just to be happening outside Holmes’ body but also grinding and shrieking _in her head_ , absurd as it was—and she knew—but it felt that way. Was she breathing? The floor left splinters in the palms of her burned hands. Was she breathing?

The pain in her chest had to mean she was breathing. Had to. Up now, in the darkness, up the stairs which would surely collapse into flames at any minute, up towards the door—which opened into a rectangle of yellow light.

She kicked and elbowed her way out of the staircase, refusing to let the two firemen at its top simply drag her, their helmets throwing the light of the fire back at her and leaving her disorientated, deafened, grasping.

One of the firemen tried to loop an arm around her chest to pull her onwards. 

Panic sparked blindly, like the flicker of electricity which had started the blaze, and Holmes drove an elbow into his stomach. They staggered apart, Holmes with her hands already raised in apology, her mind and body both reeling and clumsy from the smoke—but then something around them crackled and cracked, and the thick, grey swirls thickened, and they ran, groping their way through smoke and and debris, stumbling through a house which had turned into a maze, pushing through clouds of burning ash and snarling walls. Looking for an outside.

Of course, outside still existed. Of course, outside there was breathable air. Of course, outside there was an approximation of normality. The cold air hit Holmes like a blow as she stumbled out into it, half dragging and half being dragged by one of the firemen. The other wasn’t there. After a few steps, some support vanished; the fireman realised he was alone and whirled to yell something into the flames (and Holmes preserved that one detail, perfectly clear against the ugly, bubbling mix which the rest of the world had been transformed into). Black blossomed behind her eyes.

For a while, everything was very quiet.

She was slumped on the pavement again, she realised. The reeling pale sky and the tops of buildings a familiar sight, even if now one of the buildings was being eaten up by thick bloody flame. There were onlookers. There was Miss Adler. And a doctor, this time, whom Miss Adler was vigorously fending off, refusing to let the man near to Holmes. Her cloak and hat were missing, and she was a ferociously dignified mess.

With her cheek against the cobbles, Holmes stared with some interest at the hem of Miss Adler’s dress, which was thick with street mud but also caked, unusually, in soot. Her boots (revealed when Miss Adler whirled around on one of the doctor’s colleagues and announced, “He shall be perfectly fine without your meddling, sir; the last thing the poor man needs is to be _prodded_ —”) were similarly blackened. A long rip up the side of her skirt, exposing a foot of petticoat, indicated that she had caught herself on something, much like her missing hat and tumble-down hair suggested she’d been forcing herself through low doors or scrabbling through hostile hallways. She had stayed in the house rather than simply rush out, then. Indeed, from how the soles of her boots had been nicked on uneven floorboards and a protruding nail, neither of which would ever have been permitted in her living space, she had run up to the servants’ living quarters—where, Holmes imagined, without anything to do, the house left dormant in its mistress’ absence, they would have mostly been congregated.

Holmes struggled up onto her elbows and then fell back, the world a swirl of colour; flashes of the sky, Miss Adler’s muddied skirts, the flames licking the wrong side of her vision. The fireman’s voice was yelling something indistinct at the edge of her hearing. He had found his colleague. Holmes was breathing. She knew this because it was almost the only thing she could hear properly; the rest of the world was a muted murmuring, Miss Adler’s tones wavering in and out of clarity, giving the strange and strangely peaceful impression of being far underwater. Holmes’ head hit the cobbles again.

Why would the firemen have been there? It was such an out of the way little staircase.

Miss Adler’s face swam suddenly close as she dropped to her knees beside Holmes, putting a welcome barrier between her and the rest of the world. The universe hummed, flickered and then suddenly Holmes could hear Miss Adler’s voice with perfect clarity; “—die, then tell me.”

“I’m afraid you shall have to lower yourself to repetition.”

“Oh, you’re fine,” Miss Adler said, sitting back on her heels with a sort of shuddering relief, a laugh bubbling out of her mouth. Holmes pulled herself up again and this time succeeded in staying that way, a smile struggling to exist at the corners of her mouth.

“I see you alerted your staff to the danger,” she said, her voice rattling in her throat, “and directed the firemen to the right staircase.” The smile had lost its battle with her lips, but it was obvious in her voice. So was how the smoke had scorched her throat.

“Hardly your most impressive deduction yet. Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t run away? You must have more faith. But you went down to shut the power off, did you? You are,” Irene said, her shoulders shaking with quiet mirth and even quieter terror, her smile cracking open her face with perfectly honest feeling, shining like the sun through a broken-in roof, “why, you are indisputably the stupidest man I have ever met.”

“They would have gone in there with water—” A cough jerked in Holmes’ chest, but didn’t quite make it out of her chest. She gave a convulsive shudder and Irene started forwards, but Holmes held up a hand. “I am perfectly alright.” It was a croak.

“Can you stand? Do let’s get out of here.”

Holmes clasped Irene’s hand, and allowed her to help her to her feet, though not to support her as she walked. She had a brief, unnerving moment of feeling the cobbles lurch beneath her, but the world soon steadied. She tightened the cravat that someone—she suspected Irene—had loosened, and noted that she had lost her hat in the house. Over Irene’s shoulder, she watched the blaze fight back. She could feel the heat on her face from here. “Daalmans was thorough,” she murmured. An understatement. She stared at the flames, nauseated and impressed by the sheer depth of Daalmans' obsession.

“Let’s not,” Irene said, and Holmes saw that her hands were tightly fisted. She was keeping her back to the flames. “At least not just now.”

“Very well.”

Holmes offered her arm, and Irene moved to demand it at the same moment. They met half way, Irene’s fingers spreading out at the inside of her elbow and gripping tight for a moment, and then each tried to steer the other away from the burning house. “I don’t believe anyone’s been hurt so far,” Irene said, her voice carefully calm, “though I suddenly feel distinctly less well-off.”

“I’m sure you have enough to go around.”

“One might say that. Oh—I have some things of yours,” she said suddenly, stopping and fussing one-handedly with her bag for a moment before finally giving in to the fact that she would have to release Holmes’ elbow. She gave a fleeting, wry smile, and did just that—in order to pull Holmes’ gloves and cigarette case from her bag.

“Ah,” Holmes said, taking them from her, stashing her cigarette case between her teeth as she pulled on her gloves and flexed her fingers inside them with distinct pleasure. She frowned, plucked the case from her mouth, and said, in a very decisive tone, “One of your servants.”

“Yes. John, my coachman.”

“The man who you sent to stand guard over me the other day. Doubtless you told him to keep me away from the vicinity of the safe and sparked his curiosity. And John does not have your letters or your photograph?”

“My God, I wish. No. He only tried his luck after I had left, you see? And very lucky he was, too. Or might have been, had I not guessed that he had tried to steal from me.”

“Mm. It is hardly a surprise. What was in there the first time?”

“I'd left a necklace of some value in there with my letters—a necklace of little too much value, if you catch my meaning.” Her smile was a practiced, fluttering ripple, her lashes sweeping her cheeks for a moment. “An unwanted gift. Godfrey knew as much, hence why she left it. She's not interested in things she can't sell.” Irene had retaken Holmes’ arm, and they were moving slowly onwards. Holmes’ whole body ached, the pain starting to finally leak into her muscles. Her mouth was still fighting a smile. The sweat soaking her collar and the dull, pervading ache felt perversely rewarding. “At least I know _she_ wasn’t trying to kill me.”

“What a gift for optimism you have.”

“Ha! Where are we going?”

“Baker Street,” Holmes sighed, leaning a little too heavily on Irene before correcting herself with an annoyed twitch of her lips.

“A real invitation? You flatter me.”

“I’m afraid, Miss Adler, that it’s chiefly to do with the fact that this cigarette case is empty and I have tobacco waiting for me in my rooms.”

Holmes raised her eyebrows. Irene lost her composure completely, in a sudden snap. One moment she was tensely upright, smiling brightly over her shock, and the next she was almost slumped against Holmes, chest heaving, breath sobbing, but not crying: laughing.

Holmes caught her, or rather Irene caught herself on Holmes, one of her hands still at her elbow and the other crossing over to grip Holmes’ shoulder, and then she bowed her head into the crook of Holmes’ shoulder too, her mouth against the back of her hand. Holmes was stiff, her mouth open, unable to respond.

“Forgive me,” Irene said, pulling herself upright once more, her mouth wild and smiling. There were laughing tears on her cheeks. She was still holding tightly onto Holmes, her fingers rumpling Holmes’ already-rumpled jacket. Her hand squeezed Holmes’ shoulder, almost a mannish gesture. “ _Do_ forgive me. But you must admit it’s funny. Sherlock Holmes—the only man in the world who gets trapped in a fire and finds that, having escaped, all she wants to do is smoke.”

Far away—or so it seemed—the fire was slowly grumbling its way into submission, leaving Irene Adler’s life in London in ruins and glancing off their faces. The spots of light on Irene’s face were wetly golden, and shadows swept and flickered over her skin. She didn’t look like she cared that her house was burning somewhere behind them. She didn’t look like she’d just said anything of importance.

 _She_ was close to _he_. The crash and snarl of the fire had been enough to scramble Holmes’ hearing, surely. She didn’t know if she was hoping for that outcome or not. “What?” Holmes said, her own voice sounding weak in her ears.

“Nothing of any consequence,” Irene promised her. “Come along. Baker Street, you said.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! My energy levels and a suspicious number of hand injuries (...no, I knocked my wrist and put my shoulder out of whack with strange posture issues) conspired against this chapter, but here it is.
> 
>  **"Bate's Frizzetta hair lotion"** \- This really existed and not two days ago I had a link to an advertisement :| But now it's gone forever, apparently. It included two dashing New Women on their bikes.
> 
>  **"dynamo room"** \- [What a dynamo looks like.](http://www.learnnc.org/lp/media/uploads/2007/07/generator_.jpg) Considering this is from the Biltmore Estate, take a guess at how rich Irene is. (That said, you think Daalmans took money off her?)
> 
> I would also like to share with you a note on how seriously I take my planning and my outlines. The little matter of John the coachman discovering the safe was described in one bullet point of my outline as 'COACHMAN JOHN FUCKS SHIT UP'. /tip hat


	5. "A remarkable woman."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER in order of appearance: abortion, IV drug use, violence, mild gore, cissexism, sexism, heterosexism both external and internalised, and [spoiler]. The last warning is in the end notes, and has the potential to be triggery.**

**The Warsaw-Vienna Railway, 1885**

The train was stopped on the tracks. It was the only punctuation mark on the blank, dark page of the Austrian countryside just before sundown. And all Irene could do was hope that she was far enough from Warsaw that they wouldn’t come after her.

She had played the role of rich invalid in order to organise a compartment of her own, with curtains hastily set up and the seats turned to a bed. It had been an easy act to pull off, what with the rumours which had been circulating about her. With an air of faded glory hanging around her like scratched-up gold, she had boarded the train at Warsaw, wearing an expression of cold exhaustion and a fetching new fur coat which hung too loose on her skinny shoulders. The attendants had stood to attention with the air of particularly conscientious undertakers in case she might need anything—they had even prepared a wheelchair—but all she had requested was peace and quiet.

Her breath left a ghostly mark on the window of her private compartment. Golden light was spilling in, making her blink. She was huddling in that same fur coat, trying to escape the chill, but her legs were bare. She rubbed her left foot against her right ankle, wriggling her naked toes.

 _You little slut_ , Agata Maypin had said. Except she’d said it in Russian, in the knowledge that Irene had always had trouble with Russian—to the extent that Irene half suspected she had only bothered with Bertie because she could talk to him. Well, it didn't matter. _You little slut_ was recognisable no matter the language.

Still, Irene grinned at the memory. The fur coat she was wearing had once belonged to Agata Maypin.

It wasn’t doing much too keep her warm. Either that, or the cramps gripping her stomach were making her shiver. She should go back to bed, she knew—but “bed”, really a long seat disguised with sheets, was sweat-sticky and feverish and still not warm. She couldn’t get comfortable there. It had been a mistake to try to do this while travelling, she knew, but sometimes one had to do the ridiculous. People very often mistook the ridiculous for the impossible. She wanted to be restored to herself, anyway, by the time she was on the train from Vienna to Paris. Her mouth stretched in a wider smile, and she leaned her forehead against the cold glass, closing her eyes.

Take the incident with the fur coat—and the jewellery—and the cash, too, she supposed. That was probably, _technically_ , ridiculous, but it didn’t feel like it had been the wrong thing to do at all. It hadn’t really felt like a theft. She wasn't a thief. Thieves, she suspected, didn’t let themselves in. 

The Maypins had been out at the opera, and the key which Richard Maypin had given Irene back when he had been more than just her manager and there really had been something for Agata to be jealous of had stuck in the side door.

Thieves also didn’t know the housemaids of the places they broke into. Irene had shut the door behind her and looked anxiously and apologetically at Consuela, the maid of all work, who had come stumbling sleepily down the corridor, and looked baffled. “...Miss Adler?”

“Oh, hello. I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

“No,” Consuela had said, shaking her head.

She and Irene had shared the common indignities of not speaking Russian well, of being relegated to using the side door and of calling Richard ‘Mr Maypin’. Irene had liked her immensely, but had never been able to convince her to call her by her first name. Still, she didn’t particularly blame her for clinging to safety in decorum; Agata Maypin had a sixth sense for scandal, and a cruel smile. “I didn’t know you were coming by. Mr Maypin’s not...”

“Not in. I know. He said yesterday that I should drop in when the family was out; to pick up the tickets for the boat.”

“The boat to...” Consuela had known, of course. Everybody had known. Agata had made sure everybody knew.

“Back to America.” Irene’s hand had rested on her lower stomach. It was flat, but it had felt somehow fragile beneath her fingers. She had smiled with rigid calm. “Home. It leaves in a few days. Mr Maypin’s organised it all, but he keeps forgetting to give me things.”

“Glad he’s taking care of you, Miss.”

Irene had been aching and weak that night; the taste of parsley tea had lingered on the back of her tongue. She had gulped down six cups of it in trembling succession before grabbing the key to the side door and setting off for the Maypins’ house, feeling nauseous. She had been drinking the stuff for what felt like weeks. “Yes,” she had said, “yes, well, he has _always_ taken care of me.”

Irene opened her eyes, eyelashes scraping against the cold glass. Outside, the world was frighteningly still. Taken care of her; yes, he had. She had contrived to meet him in New York, ten years ago now, knowing that if she could just get a chance to sing for him, he would sweep her up and transport her to a world of operatic success. He was famous for it, plucking girls out of obscurity and making them prima donnas. And hadn’t he done just that for her? —by taking her with him to Poland, where she was cold all the time and she could sing but couldn’t speak; by taking a nice cut of her earnings, too, and keeping her in jewels and silk so that it had been a while before she had realised that she didn’t have any money. She had things. She had things other people bought for her.

She supposed it was ironic that Richard had at least done more than Bertie, who had ruined everything and who really could fix everything, too. But Richard hadn’t been trying to take care of her when he had arranged to bring an end to her operatic career and have her shipped back to New York. He had just been trying to shake her off. She had tried to argue: she didn’t like Poland, but she liked singing, liked being a prima donna, _liked_ the jewels and the silk. It was better than starving. She brought in crowds, she had argued: she had admirers.

Yes, Richard had said, but his wife wasn’t among them, and Irene was coming up on thirty, and didn’t she want to go home? Wasn’t she always saying how cold she was? How she struggled with Russian?

All of it was true, but Irene knew that returning to New York was returning to poverty and obscurity. And she would go to hell before she went back there.

So she had found other options. 

The Maypins’ staircase had seemed endless, even though she’d climbed it before. The rooms had seemed alien; that wasn’t new. She had groped her way through the dark, silent house,and lit a single candle once she found herself—for the first time in a while, with new objectives now—in the master bedroom.

( _You little slut_. In truth, Irene had guessed the meaning of the words from how Agata had been sneering in the direction of Irene’s stomach).

She had occupied a no-man’s-land in the Maypins’ lives for years now, since Richard Maypin had first installed himself as her manager in New York. She had been a ghost in that house, and in their lives, for quite some time. It had been time, that night, to be something else.

The delicate gold chains Agata favoured in her jewellery had crumpled and crunched between Irene’s fingers, slipping through them like so much sand. She hadn’t lacked jewellery, of course. But, well: she had been there, and the jewellery box had been in front of her, and it wasn’t like anyone else was going to give her anything. Not Richard, not Agata, not Bertie. For a moment, she had wondered what to take. Then she had taken everything she could reach, stuffed it in her bag and down her front and up her sleeves, taken Agata’s fur coat because she hated her, hated her, hated her, quenched the candle before she left and locked the door after her.

And gone to the train station.

Irene was dragged back into the present by her muscles jarring and cramping again and she groaned, pressing her forehead harder against the glass window. Her breath crystalised and steamed in front of her. The glass squeaked against her skin. She put her hand to the small of her back and massaged in slow, useless circles.

Wetness pulsed between her legs. Irene stopped still, eyes flickering open. She slipped her fingers downwards. They came away bloody. Treasonously so.

She felt like now was the time to be wry about having royal blood on her hands, but it was really just her blood and it didn’t feel like a crime. It didn’t really feel like anything except a relief, and even then a small one. She couldn’t quite feel happy at the idea of no longer being with child; she was tired, and couldn’t be bothered trying to grasp the idea. She was just glad she wouldn’t have to choke down one more cloying cup of parsley tea, hot or cold, fresh off the boil or chilled and secreted in the vaguely medical-looking bottle which she’d stowed in her luggage. 

She smiled. The train shuddered under her feet. They were ready to move.

**London, 1889**  
 **22nd March**

The new garments sat laid out on the bed beside Irene, pressed crisp and flat. The dress was pretty enough, though the rich purple colour did seem like an attempt to cheat at half-mourning. The hatpin which had come with the hat would have to be dealt with somehow; she absolutely couldn’t wear it out. And all this, really, was perfectly fine and easily solved. She would forgo the hatpin and balance the hat as best as she could with what she had; as for the colour of the dress, well, she wouldn’t mind being taken for a fetching young widow. 

But the underwear; oh dear, the underwear.

Irene had to admit a mix of disappointment and wry amusement at all that stern white cotton. Still, the silk pantalettes and camisole underneath her ruined blue gown were by now drenched in sweat and unpleasantly slippery and cold on her skin. Her petticoat had met an even worse fate, steeped as it was in ash and street-mud. Staunch cotton it would have to be.

Whenever she had the energy to actually change her clothes, anyway.

She rubbed the hem of the serious cotton chemise between her fingers. Perhaps she deserved a little nunlike self-flagellation for shocking Mrs Hudson so much. The look on the poor woman’s face when she and Sherlock Holmes had stumbled through the door—each trying to hold the other up, rumpled, burned and a little bloody, likely reeking of smoke and sweat, tracking in soot—had been one profound but unsurprised horror, which had only intensified when Holmes’ first words to her had been, “Mrs Norton will be needing new clothes, Mrs Hudson.”

To her credit, she had drawn herself up and simply replied with, “Well, nothing of _mine_ shall fit her.” And soon after, laden with a card detailing Irene’s measurements, some money taken from the purse which the Prince had left on Holmes’ desk and a plea for ‘anything but pastels’, Mrs Hudson had surged out into the outside world and returned not long after, bearing a pretty-enough outfit and serious underwear. Irene had asked for a button hook and tried to thank Mrs Hudson as effusively as she possibly could while simultaneously ushering her away and assuring her she preferred to dress herself.

When she had finally been left alone in the scrubbed-clean spare room which Mrs Hudson had proudly informed her had once belonged to Dr Watson ("Oh—how thrilling, I love his book."), she had unpinned her hair and her pretenses and dropped down onto the bed.

So there she was, still sitting quietly on the edge, still wearing her ruined blue finery, staring up expressionlessly at the opposite wall and thinking about cotton underwear because she wasn’t sure had the energy to think about anything else.

How much sleep had she gotten last night? Little enough that the idea of actually adding together the fragmented hours seemed impossible. She gave up and reached behind herself to struggle with the buttons at the back of her bodice, then gave up on that too and slumped onto her side. She’d find a knife. Slice it off her. Not now. Soon.

“Damn this,” she muttered into Dr Watson’s pillow. Even her anger was difficult to sustain. She was too tired to hold onto anything.

Her breath slowed. Downstairs, there was the noise of Holmes pacing the perimeter of the sitting room. Irene closed her eyes, charting the sharp clicks of boots on floorboards, her fingers briefly tapping out the same rhythm for no particular reason. The sound stopped; resumed again. Holmes had been lighting a cigarette, Irene supposed.

Strange. She’d never seen Holmes smoke a cigarette, which seemed absurd, because in her mind Holmes was never without one; she felt she must know how it would look. She could picture the little indent the cigarette would make as it balanced upon Holmes’ lower lip, just barely staying in place, looking lazily precarious; and she could imagine Holmes’ fingers on the lucifer, and the sharp burst of flame—

—as the curtains went up in fire the colour of tangerines; and Marceline, whose mouth had always tasted of something citrus and sweet, something that could never fill you up, yes Marceline was there, in her sitting room, having exchanged one fire for another; asking, not unreasonably, why Irene kept burning things.

Irene shot up from the pillow, her heart screaming in her chest and her breaths coming in hard pants. She made an indistinct noise and clutched tight at the sheets of Dr Watson’s bed, shaking away the acrid flashes of the dream.

The building was silent. Holmes had stopped pacing. Irene breathed slowly. Her mouth tasted of old smoke and sleep; awful, in other words. She needed a knife for this dress, and some food, and about eight hours of solid sleep.

Slowly, still trying to push the dream away, Irene dragged herself up to her feet, splashed her face with water from the basin and pushed back her hair, listening to the silence. Of course, Holmes could be sitting in the living room, cigarette naturally in hand, staring at the wall or at something dark and internal, but she doubted it.

Good. Knife first. Then, perhaps, food. Sleep would have to wait until later. She had plans. And she had woken up angry, she realised; that was what was making her heart thud and her blood fizz under her skin. She wasn’t scared. She was angry. She could taste it on the back of her tongue.

Irene wiped water from her face, slipped out of Dr Watson’s room (was it, still? Mrs Hudson still considered it as such, that had been obvious) and picked up her skirts as she crept down the stairs. She craned her neck to see if Holmes was still lurking in the sitting room, but it was empty, which was something of a relief. She hated how much Holmes knew, all those facts and figures and logical suppositions. She was so tired and so furious that she felt transparent, incapable of putting up any defences.

She crossed the sitting room to the fireplace, the grate of which was cold and mercifully empty. She frowned at the knife which attached a stack of recent correspondence to the mantelpiece, and touched the handle experimentally, then tugged, but it was stuck fast, embedded firmly in the wood. Irene wiped her hands on her skirt, but that did nothing but make them sooty.

There was a low, ragged noise of pain.

Slowly, very slowly, as if not sure she wanted to see, Irene looked over at the door to Holmes’ bedroom. It was still closed, of course. A tense silence gripped the room and Irene suddenly knew that, on the other side of the door, Holmes was frozen in hesitation just like Irene was.

She was holding her breath, she realised, and almost gave a completely inappropriate laugh as she let it it out.

Of course, she moved forwards, always drawn in by what she should really leave alone. It wasn’t like Holmes would actually let her in. She put her hand to the door, knowing Holmes would hear footsteps and the rustle of her dress, and waited for the protest from inside. It didn’t come. So she pushed, experimentally, expecting to feel Holmes pushing back, keeping her out.

Instead, the door swung inwards. Irene couldn’t stop her little intake of shocked breath.

Sherlock Holmes stood facing away from her, back presented like a blank and impenetrable refusal, jacket and waistcoat in a jumble on the floor. The stark white of Holmes’ shirt was interrupted by a line of red, some new, some old, in a neat, linear stain which stretched from shoulderblade to shoulderblade. The white cotton was rumpled where the older blood had dried in stiff, unnatural folds.

Holmes was either refusing to acknowledge Irene’s presence or refusing to acknowledge anything strange about it; undoing his cuffs, unless they were her cuffs instead.

Irene stared, transfixed by the neat bloodstain, and trying to imagine how cotton bandages, just like the ones she’d seen coiled in Holmes’ drawer when searching through her dressing table earlier. “Do you—all the time? Every day?” she asked, her knuckles white on the doorframe.

Holmes shrugged, and Irene heard the slight catch of breath the movement caused as, she supposed, bandages dug into skin which was already cut and rubbed raw. “What would be the point otherwise?”

“It must be so painful.”

“Of course,” Holmes said. “And entirely worth it. You, of all people, must understand that.”

“How do you breathe?”

“Ha. And I suppose that famous waist, Miss Adler, is entirely natural?”

“Keep your deductions to yourself.” Irene’s joking tone slid uneasily into the room, not quite fitting. Holmes gave a huff of laughter. Her own weak smile slipping away, Irene asked, “Is it quite the same thing?”

“No. But you might call it comparable.”

Irene had known, of course. But she hadn’t seen. And she still didn’t quite understand.

Holmes had made someone—she assumed Dr Watson—throw a smoke-bomb into her sitting room in order to confirm that she really had been caught in a fire once. Irene had opted to wear her walking clothes to meet Holmes for similar reasons. God, she’d been confused at first, trying to hold Godfrey up to Holmes and Holmes up to Godfrey, until she’d realised that trying to decode Holmes through comparison was absolutely futile.

So: “Can I ask?”

“You’re going to,” Holmes said, still facing away, “regardless of my answer. Which would be pointless in any case, because I have very little idea what you _wish_ to ask, even though you seem to think it obvious.” The shirt was translucent with sweat, and now that she could look further than the awful red stain, Irene could see the outline of the bandages beneath. Holmes’ voice was as calm, quiet and frightening as the bloodstain, which moved with the muscle beneath; the cuffs were dropped to the floor, the cravat taken to task. “You’re almost used to this.”

“Oh, no. Not terribly. I was only going to ask: should I call you Mr Holmes, or Miss Holmes?”

Holmes was still. For a long time, Irene didn’t think she was going to get any kind of response. Instead, she looked around the room.

It had startled her when she had first snuck inside. It was so small. There was a bed; a wardrobe; a dressing table; books; a desk. Though the room was small, the furniture managed not to fill it in the slightest. For all of Holmes’ sharp urbanity there was something strangely rustic about the slightly mismatched furniture and the sense of hard study which seemed to be built into the very floorboards. The light from the windows list up dust motes drifting in silver shoals through the air, eddying this way and that whenever the stillness of the room was disturbed.

The bed still confused her. She had, at first, expected at least double bed; many single men had double beds; but Holmes’ was narrow and low—and not perfectly made-up, which had struck a curious note. She had expected either no bed at all, the revelation that Holmes in fact never slept—or perfect, military crispness in every fold of the sheets, as if they were only touched by accident, and then rarely—or, if there was disruption, wild and careless disruption, with sheets torn and flung haphazardly about the place, singed through with cigarette-burns, draped half-way across the floor. Instead, she had found the bed half-heartedly turned-out, hastily made-up by someone caught in the awkward space between a vague taste for neatness and an complete inability to keep a house.

For some reason, she had expected the room to make more sense when Holmes was actually occupying it, putting it in context. It didn’t. The bed still looked frighteningly like it belonged to a human being, who slept and so on. The pillow still seemed conspicuously dreamed-on.

Holmes’ cravat dropped to the floor, pulling Irene’s attention away from the bed. “Did you ask the Norton the same thing?” Holmes asked, still turned resolutely away.

“No. She isn’t quite like you.”

“Quite likely no one is. Shut the door.”

“With me on which side?” Irene asked.

Holmes’ fingers stilled. “Does anyone know the answer to that question, Miss Adler?”

Irene started and then laughed aloud, looking away from Holmes’ back. “You still think I’m a snake, then,” she said with a rueful smile, glancing over the dressing table and the washstand. Absently, she wondered why on earth there was a razor there. 

“Women aren’t to be trusted,” Holmes said. “Not the best of them.”

Irene stepped forwards into the room. Holmes looked around at her. The door closed with a sharp click, and she watched how Holmes’ eyes snapped to the handle and then back to her face.

Irene licked her lips. Holmes’ face flickered like an uncertain candle flame. “Do you mean even the best women are untrustworthy?” Irene asked. “Or that the best women, as a group, are all absolutely devoid of moral compass?”

“I imagine you have already arrived at your conclusion.”

“You never answer questions, do you.”

“On the contrary.” Holmes turned to face her properly, leaning one jagged hip against the dressing table. “I answer questions for my living, and I do it on my terms.” 

Because Holmes was addressing his-or-her remarks to the ceiling and not to Irene, Irene decided she was free to let her eyes drop down over Holmes’ figure, standing against the sunlight, all sharp elbows and straight lines. Not a beautiful woman or a handsome man, except: except for something. It didn’t really matter what that something was; what Irene liked was Holmes’ natural _except_.

“If you’re thinking of painting me,” Holmes said suddenly and with deadly accuracy, eyebrows arched, “I must humbly request that you think again.”

“Well, I would paint you,” Irene said, words slipping out of her mouth without any real permission from her mind, easy and sweet as honey, “but I’d need a title, and I don’t know yours yet.”

Too much. And too far. Irene’s heart sank. For a moment, catching Holmes’ frozen look, she thought she’d as good as slammed the door in her own face—but then Holmes gave a quiet hum of half-amused laughter and pulled out a drawer from the dressing table, plucking a cigarette from some emergency stash there. “So you were considering it.”

“Certainly.” Irene looked away again. She had expected the conversation to end there, rather abruptly, and with some vehemence, so it took her a moment to work out quite how to continue. “I am always considering it. I often see things as potential paintings.” The bed. Take the bed. She was going to have to paint the bed just to get it out of her mind.

“Indeed. You desire the world in a frame, do you?”

“No.”

“Hn.”

“Does the idea offend of me painting you offend you that much?”

“It hardly offends me, Miss Adler,” Holmes sighed. “I just fail to see any merit in it. Do you object to my smoking?”

“Of course not.”

Holmes struck a match. Irene looked away from the sudden flare of fire, remembering how it had lit up her dreams. Cigarette lit, Holmes shook the match out and said, “You’re sure.”

Irene’s lips twitched when she tried to smile, her mouth tasting bitter. Alexandre hadn’t just made her scared, a steady, dull, constant fear which she woke up with and went to bed with. He’d made her ashamed of herself for it. Her anger licked up her spine again. “I can hardly go through life with a fear of matches.”

Holmes looked at her searchingly, eyes narrowed for a moment, and then seemed to agree, expressing the thought with an economical flicker of the eyebrows. Irene almost laughed again, tired as she was. There was something wonderfully strange about Holmes’ lack of interest in her vulnerabilities, something which caught Irene pleasurably off-guard each time.

She had been absolutely right about how Holmes looked while smoking, right down to how dangerously the cigarette balanced and the lazy but somehow precise way in which Holmes gestured with it, sending smoke blossoming in foggy curlicues, catching the light from the window—because it was only just past noon, Irene realised. _Lord_. 

She might have to paint that, too. Not the smoke; the sunlight. She’d need to catch the colour of surprising light. The colour of the feeling of not knowing what time it was, or should be. The colour of the feeling of the suspicion that you were going completely—

“I prefer to be Mr Holmes,” said Holmes, gazing away from her as if following the trails of smoke, which were diffusing now, providing the room with its own private fog, only really visible in those shafts of sunlight which drew stern rectangles on the walls and floor.

Irene wasn’t very used to not knowing what to say. Godfrey, certainly, had never put her beyond words. “Thank you,” she said eventually. back up to Holmes, who stood half-illuminated in shirt-sleeves. Watching her.

“I’m not a man,” Holmes said, quite deliberately, staring at Irene as if the words were meant to be some sort of threat.

“I know,” said Irene.

The sun was behind Holmes’ shoulder, and the creases on the sleeves of her shirt were dark crescents of shadow. She breathed smoke slowly and silently into the air. Irene waited for her to say something, but she remained mute, and her silence was completely opaque.

“I didn't think he could have done anything to the Théâtre,” Irene said. “I thought it was Bertie.” Holmes frowned, blowing out a long plume of smoke. Her cheeks hollowed. She was looking somewhere off to her right rather than at Irene. Irene waited and then, because Holmes showed no sign of response, continued, feeling like she was flinging her words down a well, waiting for a splash she wasn’t sure was coming. “I suppose he’s the Prince of Wales to you.” Nothing. “Would you like to talk about something else?”

Holmes stirred, turning to look at Irene as if she were trying to pin her back against the door with her gaze. There was a deep furrow between her brows. She said nothing.

Irene shrugged, and blew a curl off her face. “You didn’t seem to enjoy any of the subjects I was suggesting,” she explained. Holmes snorted quietly and moved over to the bed. For a moment she rummaged inscrutably beneath the pillow; then she pulled out a plain, black-handled knife, and held it out.

Irene blinked at the proffered handle, and then remembered that she’d come downstairs in the first place looking for some way to cut off her dress.

She smiled. It actually happened without her permission, spilling onto her face. Her exhaustion was wearing her down to sincerity, she realised, half amused and half horrified by it. “I suppose you want me to be terribly awestruck by you deducing my thoughts,” she said.

“No,” Holmes replied, sounding just as tired. “Not particularly.”

The light glanced off the blade and into Irene’s eyes. “What a shame,” Irene said, wrapping her fingers around the handle. “I am, you know. Terribly awestruck. And I shan’t say so again. Thank you, Mr Holmes. I do hope you’ll be careful.”

“I always am. Now; privacy.”

She stepped swiftly backwards. The door shut in her face. Irene didn't allow herself to stare at it. She shook her head and swept up the stairs instead, knife in hand. Moments later, the sound of ripping fabric filled the air. She tore it more brutally than was necessary.

The second time she descended the stairs, carefully turned out in dark purple and grey with her not-quite-perfectly curled hair shadowed by her hat, the awful hatpin having been shoved up her sleeve, she was a little more stately. Certainly, she was exhausted, and a hot red anger still hummed just under her surface, but the look of the thing...that was important. And she looked neat. Her inner obeyed her outer. She was thinking more clearly. She wasn’t thinking about paints. She wasn't thinking about Holmes. She wasn't distracted.

Holmes still wasn’t in the sitting room, and this time—though Irene spared the door to her bedroom a glance—there was no sound of sign of life from the room beyond. Irene shook her head, and drifted instead to the window, her mind somewhere organised and dark.

The sight of the street outside interrupted her musings.

“Oh,” she murmured, and then glanced hastily over her shoulder to check that Holmes’ door remained shut; she must have heard, but never mind. Irene turned back to the glass, a slight smile tugging her mouth upwards.

She had been wondering where Holmes had stashed him.

*

The world rushed in her ears, and then crystallised. Holmes breathed in hard, and eased the needle out of her arm, feeling everything come together. Lines sharpened. Her mind cleared. Even the pain in her chest brightened. Oh, God. Yes. Fine. She was fine. This was all she had needed to be fine. She folded her shirt sleeve back down with quick, long fingers, and pulled on her jacket.

She didn’t usually need it when on cases, but it had been a good idea. She had tried other things. She had wrapped her fresh bandages as tightly as she could, trying to control her mind through the unwieldy conduit of her body. It hadn’t worked. Measures had been taken. And she was fine. She couldn’t do this if she was busy peeling herself apart.

Of course, Watson wouldn’t approve, but Watson, Watson—

She stopped, staring at herself in the mirror, halfway through slicking back her hair.

The inside of her head had been so chaotic before she had snatched up her cocaine-bottle that, between red blooms of pain all through her torso as she struggled to unwind her bandages and the mess Irene Adler had reduced her thoughts to, she had forgotten that Watson didn’t live here anymore. 

His footsteps in the room outside had turned into background noise. They always had been background noise before. She hadn’t noticed. What was wrong with her?

Nothing. Nothing was wrong. She was fine. But she had told him not to contact her, for God’s sake, and for good reason. And now he was in there with _Adler_ , of all people, exactly the woman she’d been trying to keep away from him.

Holmes threw down her comb and burst into the living room to see Irene in the chair reserved for clients and Watson in his old seat by the fireplace, both of them looking obscenely as if they were getting on well. A new dress on Irene. A single tiny burnmark on Watson’s cheek, just like the ones which peppered Holmes and Irene. He had been to Briony Lodge, or what remained of it. Running after her. 

“Mr Holmes,” Irene said, smiling. Mrs Hudson had set out tea and an array of sandwiches ranked by filling in an absurdly incongruous display of domesticity, all things considered. Irene had one in hand. “You look fully restored, I’m so glad. I was just filling Dr Watson in on the events of the case—and discussing how best to bring it to its proper conclusion.”

Watson nodded, and added, “Mrs Norton suggests that we should—”

“I believe I told you not to contact me,” Holmes said, the words jumping out of her mouth before she could stop them. The whole room stilled. Miss Adler looked up at Holmes with an infuriatingly sceptical cast to her mouth.

Watson sat back, jaw set. “True,” he said. “And then I received word that you had nearly died in a fire.” He left his sentence there as if trying to give her a chance. Holmes, irritated by the idea of needing a chance, pressed her teeth together and refused to respond. Watson continued, his voice still quiet but a little harder, “As your doctor, and as your friend, I could hardly ignore it.”

Which got a little more of a response.

“ _Nearly died_ ,” Holmes scoffed, striding to the mantelpiece for a light, having taken out her refilled cigarette case simply to have something to do with her hands. Her heart jumped and shuddered in her chest, her knuckles white on the matchbox. “Gossip. I had thought better of you.”

“Holmes, I apologise for going against your instructions, but I hardly see that I’ve endangered your investigations simply by—”

“It is _entirely irrelevant_ now that you’re _here_ ,” Holmes said, lighting her cigarette with a vicious movement.

The room was quiet—and cold—once more. That was perfectly fine too. Watson’s appearance was another complication, another part of the world spinning out of her hands, but it didn’t matter. The fact that he had gone to Briony Lodge, having heard about the fire, didn’t matter. She had to think about Daalmans. The drug would wear off soon, leaving her to focus alone. She all but snatched the cigarette from her mouth, and spat out smoke. “Miss Adler, what have you told Watson, exactly?”

Miss Adler rearranged herself, sitting up straighter. “Everything,” she said, and Holmes found she couldn’t look her in the eye with Watson sitting right there. Her jaw clenched convulsively. She tried to unstick it, staring at the end of her cigarette, as Miss Adler carried on calmly and seriously retelling a version of the truth. “I informed him of how you persuaded me to hand over the photograph in return for you solving the problem of who or what caused the fire I was nearly burned in yesterday—and of how my husband stole the photograph from me before I could hand it over, but that our attempts to recover it were...cut short.”

“And it seems to me that we ought to be wasting no time apprehending Daalmans,” Watson said, and Holmes held up a hand. 

“I’ve already begun _that_ ,” she said, in a tone designed to be long-suffering which in fact resolved itself somewhere closer to icy. She grimaced—or her mouth spasmed—and she fixed her fingers into a fist on the arm of her chair. Watson narrowed his eyes at her. Not angrily. She would have preferred that. She breathed in through her nose, let the world clear again, and by the time she had looked back to him, he was looking attentive and calm as ever. “We ought to hear a report of Daalmans’ whereabouts soon, though I can already tell you that I suspect he will spend some time looking for you, Miss Adler. No, say nothing. While he’s occupied, I suggest we and a few of Scotland Yard’s best offerings visit—”

“No,” Irene said. “No. No, I don’t want the police to be involved.”

Holmes fixed her with an even gaze. “I assure you I’m not fond of them either.”

“Then we shan’t have them.”

“Miss Adler—”

“Mr Holmes, I said no.” Irene’s voice was neither forceful nor cold, just quiet and sure. As Holmes watched, she took a delicate bite from her sandwich, before glancing up with clear, attentive eyes without a stain on them, as if the decision had been made and she was wondering why Holmes hadn’t suggested the next step yet.

Holmes sighed, and glanced across to Watson, who was still watching her. 

He looked softened around the edges, quietly intent, with nothing of the war about him. It suited him. Watson was married now, of course. Married. It wasn’t that Holmes minded Mary. Mary was charming, brave, clever. But he was _married_ , he was the sort of person who got _married_ , could find someone’s most secret edges and discover that they fitted his and _marry_ them: and Holmes was still here, like Holmes had always been. And nostalgia was nothing but anger at dust.

“What is it?” Watson inquired.

There was a quiet distance between them of about four feet, three months, one marriage, half a roll of bandages and not so much a lie as an assumption Holmes hadn’t corrected. Holmes sniffed carelessly, flicking ash. Her heart had calmed slightly. “If we can’t have police,” Holmes said, looking to Irene, who smiled politely, “we must have you, Watson. You brought your service pistol.” For what reason, Holmes couldn’t divine.

“Yes. Do you think it’ll be necessary?”

Holmes looked towards the door and didn’t reply; Watson, used to this, followed her gaze, while Irene looked between them and frowned. Her questions—she got all the way to opening her mouth—were stopped short when the door burst open and admitted a boy whose age was hidden behind grime, gangly and hard-looking around the edges. 

“Mr Holmes, Doctor,” he said, and then, after staring at Irene for a blank second, “...Missus.”

“Well?” Holmes asked, getting up and stowing her cigarette in the side of her mouth for a second as she strode over, searching in her jacket pockets.

“Fire’s out. House is bloody—blinking ruined, sorry, miss.” Holmes nearly dropped her cigarette, but of course he was talking to Irene. “Sitting room’s just ashes, nice furniture and all. I know because I saw it through the bl—inking wall, didn’t I. They’re saying they haven’t got a clue who did it or what, say they’re going to have to call on you. Also, bloke you mentioned, blonde hair, striking resemblance to a nice yellow dog someone tried to drown—I saw him. Talking to some fancy dark-haired man in a nice suit, bit of a, you know.”

“Mm. I know. Where?”

“Just off the Serpentine Mews. Looked like they wasn’t too happy with each other, if you ask me.”

“Alexandre and Godfrey,” Irene said, and to Holmes’ surprise her voice was brimming with a kind of vicious pleasure. Holmes looked over her shoulder at her, wordlessly holding out a coin to her informant. “They hate each other,” Irene explained, almost laughing, though her mouth was twisted in a smirking revulsion, “and how they love to do it. They ought to keep each other occupied for a little while.” She was getting to her feet, brushing out her rich purple skirts and shoving her shoulders back, her chin up. She caught Holmes’ eye. Holmes nodded. Watson looked between them.

“Where—”

“Alexandre’s rooms,” Irene said, crossing to the box which lay open on the coffee table, pulling out the shawl and gloves which matched the outfit Mrs Hudson had bought her. Watson got to his feet.

“I paid him a visit earlier,” Holmes said. And then, after a jagged, difficult pause: “Do you remember William Lavoie, Watson?”

Watson, caught off guard by this awkwardly offered olive branch, took a moment to say, “Yes. The patron of the arts you pretended to be for a few hours while sorting out the matter of Lady Greville's ill-advised letter. Didn’t you say—”

“One of the most irritating characters I’ve ever kept up, and not one I would ever use again. Yes. Circumstances change. He served me reasonably well for ten minutes with Daalmans, at least. Daalmans kept his plans for the theatre,” Holmes said, watching the boy leave and not shutting the door behind him. “They took pride of place on his wall, in fact. I suspect that somewhere, he has the exact details of what he turned the safe into. We shall recover them.” She watched Irene pull on her gloves. Over the last traces of the graphite stains. “And present them to the police when Miss Adler is feeling more composed.”

Miss Adler armed herself with her parasol and turned. There were knives in her smile. “If it pleases you,” she said quite placidly, taking Holmes’ arm.

*

Somehow, Watson and Irene chatted. Holmes stared out of the window of the carriage, not listening to the words they exchanged but following the rhythms of their speech, hearing the reasons they were talking. Watson kept up his end of the conversation because he thought Irene must be frightened by the prospect of searching Daalmans’ rooms; Irene responded because it was in her nature, and because—and this was the fact that stuck in Holmes’ brain, that didn’t make sense—she seemed to like Watson a great deal. It wasn’t that Watson was unlikable—the opposite, in fact—and neither was he overly conventional—he would hardly have lodged with Holmes for any length of time, nevermind aid in cases, if he didn’t have his bohemian tendencies. It was just that there was absolutely nothing Irene could possibly want from him, and yet there she was: smiling at him.

Holmes rubbed her thumb against her lower lip. Perhaps she’d missed something. She tuned into their conversation, converting sounds to speech.

“...then discovered, in fact, that his brother was at the same hospital as us, though—”

“Oh, don’t say he died, not after all that!”

Stories from Afghanistan. Holmes rolled her eyes, dropped her hand and stared harder at the outside world. Her concentration was ebbing, her thoughts starting to stumble out of order again. She wanted to remind Watson that he had a wife, but—she grudgingly admitted—he wasn’t flirting, and neither was Irene. Perhaps, had they met a few years previously—Christ, what an unsettling idea. She breathed as deep as she could, pain blooming in lines all across her torso and pulling her back into focus.

“...ask if you’re alright?” Watson’s tone had turned gentle, and Holmes knew he was leaning forwards slightly, though she kept her gaze fixedly on the blur outside the window.

“Yes, Doctor,” Irene replied, lightly and easily. “There is a man out there in the world who wants nothing more than to murder me. I can’t afford to be anything less than perfect.”

Holmes turned her head just in time to catch Watson’s blank surprise blossoming into slightly amused admiration. It was a process with which Holmes was familiar. “Delighted to hear it.”

Holmes let Irene see the side of her smile. The carriage rattled onwards, and Watson paid Irene the compliment of silence.

They stopped in front of the building Daalmans lived in, where the city was quiet in a way which was more graveyardish than suburban. Irene got down from the carriage, drew herself up, and led the way to the entrance, picking her skirts up over the weeds which had clawed their way up between the paving stones only to sag, exhausted, in the cracks. “It’s gotten worse,” she said, looking up at the building, mouth pulled tight. 

“The building is unoccupied save for Daalmans and his landlady,” Holmes said quietly, turning her head on one side and examining a broken dandelion on the path, “is that so?”

“As far as I know. The landlady doesn’t keep servants. Alexandre hates servants.”

“Mm. We’re in luck; she isn’t in.”

“What?”

Holmes waved a hand in the vague direction of the weed, trampled and bleeding sap out onto the paving stones. Its head lay in a yellow smear some distance away. Irene frowned at it, and Watson supplied, “It was broken within the last ten minutes, under the foot of someone leaving the house.”

“By a woman,” Holmes added, “don’t forget. The head stuck to her boot and she spent some time scraping at the pavement to try and get it off.”

“And only women can care about their boots, Mr Holmes?”

“Irrelevant. Daalmans certainly doesn’t.”

“Well, this is a charming distraction from the fact that if the landlady isn’t in, no one in the vicinity has a key,” Irene pointed out.

“That, _ah_ ,” Holmes said, applying her shoulder to the door with some force, making it shudder and swing open, banging against the wall, “is entirely correct, Miss Adler, yes.” Watson raised his eyebrows and briefly considered the sky, looking back again once Holmes had waved Irene inside. Their eyes met, and Holmes nearly started. He hadn’t lost all of the war, then. She jerked her head towards the open door. “And you, Watson. You’re standing in for the law, remember.”

“As ever, Holmes.”

Holmes’ mouth flickered as he passed. Strange, how quickly he could move between these worlds; not exactly comforting, but she didn't need comfort, she asserted. She needed a crack shot with a revolver.

Inside, the building was as dusty as before, and when Holmes shut the door after them, dark. What had been early spring sunlight outside here only served to show up the grime. The air felt gritty and chilly, thick enough to hold the silence in place despite their creaking footsteps. But even Miss Adler didn’t make any comment, just glanced back at Holmes and Watson and then strode on through the corridors, holding onto her dress as if to try and stay and quiet as possible, even though the house was empty, and felt like it had been empty for years.

They found Daalmans’ rooms quickly. Irene put her hand to the handle and recoiled, Holmes saw, realising it was unlocked; “Alexandre?”

No response but thick air and quiet. Holmes wondered what Irene would have done if Daalmans had replied.

“He’s just left it open,” Irene said. Her voice, for reasons which weren’t clear to Holmes, held a thick, ragged sadness in check.

“Miss Adler,” Watson suddenly interjected, “I can accompany you out if—”

“No,” she said, “thank you,” and pushed open the door.

“My God,” said Watson.

One of the chairs was on its side like a felled animal. Daalmans’ desk was scattered with paints, pencils—and paper. Endless paper. The room was awash in torn paper. The walls were scarred, Daalmans having seemingly snatched whole handfuls of paper and ripped strips of it free with no method whatsoever, an unstructured outburst of rage at all his perfect geometric ideals. Some of the plans had escaped serious damage; some hung like tired flags from their pins; some were reduced to scraps on the floorboards. In one place, the wallpaper had been torn away with the schematic which had once covered it. There was a trace of blood there.

Beside her, Holmes could feel Irene breathing in, and out, and in again, each breath shorter than the last until she stopped herself and swept inside, skirts in whispered conversation with the scraps of torn paper on the floor. Holmes and Watson followed, Watson pushing the door closed and briefly bending to look at the array of locks which clung to it uselessly.

“He must have destroyed the plan,” Irene said; “ _I_ would have destroyed it—” Holmes opened her mouth, but Irene had already cut herself off and had one hand raised. The other was over her mouth. Her brow was furrowed. She said, “Do you think he could have...”

“Yes,” said Holmes, striding towards the fireplace that obviously hadn’t held a fire in months, standing dark and hollow like a toothless mouth. She pulled her gloves off and checked the mantelpiece above and below, fingers questing along the wood while Watson watched and Irene stared at the paper on the floor, radiating a pained disgust Holmes could pick up even with her back turned.

Beneath Holmes’ fingertips, something gave. There was a rustle and a gasp as behind her, Irene swept around to look at what had just snapped open; a sliding-panel in the wall.

Slowly, Irene advanced, and Holmes and Watson separated to let her through. Inside the hole—that was all it could be called, a rudimentary hiding-place fashioned by knocking through brick—was a stack of paper, a box of bullets, and a gun.

“Bastard.” The word was slow, salty and drawn out, so deliberate that it just about dripped off Irene’s lower lip. Watson looked to her, and then looked back at the contents of the safe. He took the bullets. Holmes reached for the gun. Irene stayed with the papers.

Holmes snapped open the cylinder, standing slightly to one side. “Watson,” she said, and Watson moved closer, box of bullets in his hands. She showed him the open cylinder. Two bullets. Their eyes met, and Holmes saw Watson’s lips thin out before he picked up a bullet from the box and weighed it in his hand. Frowned.

“These are blank cartridges,” he said quietly, as if to keep his voice away from Irene, who was rummaging furiously through the papers in the safe.

“Indeed,” said Holmes, heart thudding quite evenly behind her bandages. She unloaded the pistol, dropping the two bullets into her hand. “Whilst these are real. I suspect he practices with the blanks.”

“Practices?”

“Fantasises. Whatever you want to call it.”

Holmes could feel Watson’s restraint beside her, his rigid calm the only evidence of whatever cold anger was building up inside him. “I see. And then he...”

“Saves one bullet for himself, and one for the object of his desire.”

She didn’t have to look up from the bullets in her palm to know that at moment, Watson didn’t look like a man who could ever be satisfied with anything so reliable as marriage.

Beside them, Irene made a jagged sound of shock, and they both looked around, but she was stashing whatever she had found up her sleeve, looking shaken. “Nothing. It’s not in here. It’s just...pictures of me, stories about me.” Holmes narrowed her eyes, and opened her mouth to say _Miss Adler_ when the noise of a cab coming clattering to a stop outside the front door of the building made her stop.

The room froze. And then Watson’s revolver was in his hand, the box of blank cartridges put back in the safe. He stepped between Irene and the door, shielding her. Holmes moved to reload Daalmans’ gun, even while casting around for other options.

“ _No_ ,” said Irene. Holmes turned to look at her, and then the safe, and knew what she wanted to do.

For a moment, Holmes nearly asked if Irene was sure; but that was laughable, and they didn’t have time. “Reload the pistol with those blank cartridges,” Irene said. Holmes was already doing just that, Watson staring at them.

“Holmes—”

Downstairs, the front door banged open. Footsteps lurched below. “Miss Adler has the right idea,” Holmes said.

“Yes, and what is it?”

“Hide,” Irene said to Watson, reaching out for the reloaded gun and the two bullets, which Holmes put into her hands. Her voice was ragged and stern. “Please. Go through that door there. I will be able to extract a full confession from him, but you _must_ stay hidden. Whatever happens, or whatever you think has happened, don’t reveal yourselves too early.”

Watson looked to Holmes, who nodded. He opened the door, and vanished behind it. The footsteps were on the bottom of the stairs now.

Irene stared at the gun in her hands as if it were a broken bird, and then looked up to Holmes’ face with an expression of tightly-gripped calm before turned away to stow the revolver back in the safe. As she moved, a scrap of paper slipped from her sleeve and fluttered to the floor, apparently unnoticed by her. Holmes snatched it.

It was an aged photograph, criss-crossed with white from folding. Staring out of it were two young, light-skinned black girls posed in pale lacy dresses—one in her mid-teens, and the other anywhere from seventeen to twenty. Their hair was piled identically atop their hands, their hands clasped in their respective laps; they had been instructed, no doubt, to look coolly dignified, but their mouths hinted at twin irrepressible smiles. Their eyes were startlingly dark, arresting even now.

Irene ripped it from her hand and shoved it up her sleeve with the two bullets. The sliding panel was shut. The footsteps were on the landing. “Go,” she snarled, and Holmes met her eyes, which were just as wine-dark as they had been more than a decade ago when she’d gotten her picture taken with her younger sister in a photographer’s shop in New Orleans.

Holmes shot across the room and slipped behind the door, dropping to the floor to crouch beside Watson, who hadn’t put away his revolver. Holmes clenched her teeth as she put her eye to the crack between door and doorframe. Watson took the other side of the door. Holmes tried not to breathe in dust.

“What—”

“Shh. Trust her.”

Irene was by Daalmans’ paint-spattered desk, and Holmes saw her pull her hands away from the front of her bodice and turn just as the door opened.

Daalmans stood in the doorway.

“Alexandre,” Irene said hoarsely. Watson’s shoulder was against Holmes’; Holmes could feel how tense he was.

“Irene,” Alexandre breathed, face crumpling like he might cry. The ghost of attractiveness haunted his pallid features. He was bare-headed, and his blonde hair shined greasily across his forehead. His eyes were reddened. He had ripped off half the fingernail from his right index finger. Holmes thought about the streak of blood on the wall where the wallpaper had been clawed off. “Irene.”

“I didn’t know...I’m sorry. I didn’t know quite where to go,” Irene said, her French clotted with held-back tears. “Did you hear about what happened? I couldn’t—oh, God, Alexandre, I couldn’t go to Godfrey.”

“No, dear heart.” He was stumbling forwards, grabbing her above the elbows. Watson nearly jerked forwards. Holmes grabbed his sleeve at his shoulder, holding him steady. “No, you couldn’t go to Godfrey.”

“I couldn’t, I couldn’t _find_ her, I mean,” Irene said, and Daalmans dropped his hands, as if the disappointment of being Irene’s second choice had physically broken him. Watson frowned; Holmes saw it without looking, and breathed out slowly and raggedly. Slow horror began to drip down the back of her throat, thick and cold, congealing in her lungs. She kept her eyes on Irene. “I couldn’t—she wasn’t there when I went looking and, oh, Christ, I just need someone to tell me I’m not mad—do you know where she is?”

Once, Holmes thought. She could have just said it once. Watson could have chalked it up to an error in his own understanding of French. It might have hardly mattered.

“I,” said Daalmans, stepping backwards and shaking his head. “No. No, I don’t know.”

“Oh, Christ!” The outburst was carried on a dry sob. Irene pressed the heel of her shaking hand to her brow, her breaths coming hard and desperately hoarse, ragged with threatened tears. “I—sorry. Sorry, I know it isn’t at all fair to expect you to know, but I so need to see her, I...” 

“Why?” Daalmans asked, as if from a distance.

“It’s...she is a very dear friend, and she, after the first time, the Théâtre, she was—so good...”

“Will you tell the truth for once, you lying bitch?” 

Irene started. A tear fled down her cheek as if startled out of her. Holmes tightened her grip on Watson’s jacket, fingertips digging into the warm flesh beneath. Daalmans was looking shocked at what had just tumbled out of his mouth. He panted, staring at Irene, his face crumpling pathetically again. “No,” he said, “no, forgive me, I...understand, Irene.” Irene said nothing. “But is she?”

“Is she what?” Irene whispered, her whole frame trembling.

“Your friend.”

Irene turned away from him slowly, leaning hard against the desk, supporting herself with both hands braced against the edge. Her face was shining with sweat. She looked like she might be sick at any moment. She shook her head. Daalmans watched the motion with a dazed mix of disgust and broken-heartedness. “What?” he breathed, something cold and dangerous rippling in his voice. Irene’s lips twisted and trembled, like she was locking the words behind them. “Say it.” 

“No,” Irene spat, head dropping low. “No, don’t be a fool, Alexandre. She has been my lover since 1886.” Holmes’ shallow breaths fled in and out of her lips. “You know that.”

Daalmans swayed, scrubbed a hand over his face. His mouth contorted, just once, in horrible anger, which then trembled back to something nearly tearful, which was worse. “It’s alright,” he said. “My darling, it’s alright.” When he lowered his hand, there was a thick, wretched sadness in every line of his face. His eyes were unfocused.

He was turning, walking towards the fireplace, for a moment out of Holmes’ sight. “It’s alright,” he repeated, unseen. Half-bowed over the desk, Irene’s shoulders shuddered, and a real sob finally broke from her mouth, tears streaking wetly down her face.

“I suppose you want to know about Marceline, too, if you so wish me to stop being a _lying bitch_ ,” she choked out in a hateful voice, a tear dripping off the end of her nose. “That night at the Théâtre, when she died—she was my lover too.”

The room was silent save for the noise of Irene snatching ragged breaths out of the air. “What?” Daalmans asked, his voice barely making it to Holmes’ ears.

“I was,” Irene said, “I was going to leave Godfrey, you know. But I needed to leave her for someone. I hate to be alone.”

Watson tensed—so Holmes knew, a second before she heard the sliding panel snap open, what was about to happen. Irene turned at the sound, and clamped a hand over her mouth to muffle the scream which spilled out of her, though it carried on there, trailing off into a quiet moan of horror.

Daalmans walked forwards, the gun wavering absurdly in his hand. His grip was no good. His fingers were clumsy, leaving streaks of sweat where they slipped on the gunmetal. “You could have come to me,” he said. “For God’s sake, you could have come to _me_.”

Irene whimpered, staring wild-eyed at the barrel of the gun. Slowly, she lowered her hands, tried to form the first syllable of _Alexandre_ with her mouth.

“No,” Daalmans said. “No, not this time. You shan’t talk prettily and, and _ruin_ things for yourself, not this time.”

“What?” Irene whimpered.

“ _You_ ,” Daalmans said. “Oh, God, even _you_ know it. You...you are brilliant, Irene, brilliant, but you never, ever, aim where you should aim, you...you _debase_ yourself.” His voice was full of revulsion now, thick with spittle, his face flushing an ugly dark red. “You debase yourself with the people you keep around you. Marceline, Marceline the whore, caught in every filthy, reeking bed in Paris, and what an achievement considering the very short period of time she had to do it in—be quiet! Please be quiet. Please.”

Quiet settled, broken by Irene crying softly. Slowly, Daalmans started up again, his voice gentle. “And then there’s Godfrey Norton, real name Greta, who struts around pretending to be an impresario when really she’s just a pathetic old woman who doesn’t know how freakish she really is. Yes, you’ve got a bit of a taste for those man-woman creatures, haven’t you? Shh. Please. Be quiet. Don’t cry. I’m just telling the truth. I met another one of your pet oddities, you know. A Monsieur Lavoie. A _Monsieur_ Lavoie.”

There was a snap; a break. It wasn’t audible. It happened inside and outside Holmes, a sharp and vivid crack as everything came away from everything else. The world lay cracked open, a part of it gouged out. Holmes hadn’t let go of Watson’s shoulder, though he was frozen still, as if it were possible to keep him with her, believing in her, in Sherlock Holmes, just by holding on.

Daalmans wouldn’t shut up. “What’s her real name? It’s not William. She says she’s got a wife; is that what Godfrey thinks of you? Are you Godfrey’s wife?” Irene was in hysterics at the end of the gun, shaking her head wildly, sending tears flying through the air. Daalmans was standing a few feet away from her.

“It’s alright,” he said, “it’s alright, don’t cry,” and then Holmes had thrown her arm right across Watson’s chest, shoving him back, the gunshot echoing in the air and Irene Adler howling, clutching at her stomach and crumpling downwards, curving, hitting her head off the desk, folding to the floor with a sickening slowness.

Her hand, spread over her stomach, was streaked with red which, even as she pressed to keep it inside, bloomed brighter, soaking her dress, her sleeve, her hands, the floor.

“Don’t cry,” said Daalmans, sinking slowly to his knees. “I’m sorry. I just had to do something. You understand, dear heart? I just had to do something. I’m sorry about the Théâtre. I’m sorry it didn’t work, I mean. You could have been out of this, this horrible world, oh God, a year ago. You could have been safe. I wanted so much to give you what you deserved. I wanted it to be, to be perfectly lit, like one of your performances; you were always so _beautiful_ on the stage. And today—why weren’t you at home? Why are you never where you should be?”

Daalmans raised the gun to his own head; and with a flash of memory—a dropped photograph, a truth strategically let slip, a distraction, a moment alone with a gun—Holmes realised what Irene had done. 

She stood, she shoved open the door: “Irene,” said Alexandre Daalmans, “Irene,” and the gunshot rang out, and despite the fact that Holmes had loaded only blank cartridges into the gun, so that Irene could stow a tube of red paint from Daalman’s desk beneath her bodice and stab it with the hairpin stowed up her sleeve when she needed to feign having been shot; despite the plan they had communicated between each other in a second of eye contact and understanding; despite that, a violent red splash of Daalman’s blood still splattered across the torn papers still clinging to the walls.

The gun dropped from his hand, and he lay crumpled and still.

Watson ran for Irene. Holmes dropped down next to the dead man, his head open, brain matter leaking down the side of his face. She missed whether Watson lifted Irene to her feet or whether Irene clambered there instead; she missed what they said; she missed whether Irene was really crying or whether it was left over from the act; she missed everything except the memory of Irene telling them _don’t reveal yourselves too early_ , and the way Irene stared at her over Watson’s shoulder.

The world snapped back into hard-edged focus. “The police, Watson,” Holmes said. Irene’s stare was wild, cold, defiant. “Now.”

Watson looked to Holmes, nodded, and left without a word, his face drawn hard and harsh. Irene stood there spattered with red. Holmes stepped towards her.

For a few moments, they looked at each other.

“Shall I tell you what happened?” Irene said quietly. Holmes didn’t nod. Didn’t respond in any way. Irene continued in the same soft, slightly stricken tone. “Alexandre loaded a single chamber with a live round. He aimed it at me. He wasn’t fortunate. He aimed it at himself.” Irene licked her lips. She had her shawl pulled tightly around her, her fingers clenching and unclenching in the fabric. “He wasn’t fortunate.”

“How neat, Miss Adler.”

“Well. This way, no one will ever know that you made a mistake.”

“Or that you chambered a single live bullet while I was distracted by your photograph,” Holmes said.

She expected Irene to flutter mockingly, to whimper _it’s all such a blur_ or _I don’t understand_. Instead, Irene just shrugged, exhaustion hollowing out her features. “What will you do if I tell you the truth, Mr Holmes?”

The air smelt of dust and blood and gunpowder. Irene’s eyes were tired, distant, strangely irritable, and rimmed with red like Holmes had never seen them before—but then they had only met two days ago. She had a smear of red paint on her cheek.

“It was suicide,” said Holmes. Irene’s mouth crumpled in exhausted victory. 

“Yes,” she sighed. “Yes, it was suicide.”

Predictably, Scotland Yard got it wrong. Holmes tried to pass Irene into Watson’s care, but Irene refused to be passed on to anyone. She spun, smiled, sighed and even sobbed a little more, dictating the flow of the crime scene, organising it like she had organised her attempt to help the injured clergyman from what seemed like so long ago. The stain on her dress? She had fallen against the desk when Daalmans had fired at her, and spilt paint. Why had she refused to let Mr Holmes and Dr Watson investigate the matter alone? Well, it was her house that had been burnt down...

Holmes watched, and backed up her version of events. Her brain kept shuddering over certain facts, feeling unanchored. There was Irene, who knew but acted like she didn’t; called her Mr Holmes, believed in her mind despite the absurdity of her body and everything it contained, the whole brutal unfair abnormality of her. There was Watson; Watson who could _switch off_ this left-of-normal life and go and be married, conventional, typical—Watson who, it transpired, she didn't understand. Couldn't think about. Couldn’t really look at. Watson remained largely silent, avoiding Holmes’ eyes in return. He did, however, come to stand beside her. Likely from habit.

Finally, as they stood in stiff silence at the side of the room, watching Irene give her final statement as if it were Shakespeare, Watson said, “A remarkable woman.”

Holmes stared straight ahead, knowing that Watson wasn’t looking at Irene. “Occasionally,” she said.

And then to stumble out of the building, to choke down fresh air in sharp, shallow gasps. Then to shake Watson’s hand, though the action felt unreal, far away; to watch Irene do the same, though it was like a scene from a dream. Then to find a hackney carriage; then to watch Watson hail a cab to go back to his own house, where he could be married, far away from this, from Holmes; then to find herself helping Irene up to sit beside her in the carriage, to find her hand somehow tucked in hers behind the closed doors, where they were safe from scandal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **For those looking for warnings with spoilers - WARNING FOR SUICIDE.**
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> -
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>  **"The Warsaw-Vienna Railway"** \- This really existed, and Irene could have made this journey. At Vienna, she would have changed onto the returning Orient Express and arrived not long after in Paris.
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>  **"Russian"** \- Poland at this point was undergoing serious Russification (and was in fact a part of the Russian Empire) hence why Irene's struggling with Russian and not Polish.
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>  **"parsley tea"** \- I think it's clear enough, but: parsley tea, in large quantities, will induce a period/miscarriage if one is in the early stages of pregnancy. There is a risk of incomplete miscarriage though. ...Please do not take medical advice from this fic.
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>  **"a line of red"** \- Holmes' method of binding isn't a good one. I wanted to bring this up both in and out of the story because there are a lot of misrepresentations of safe/effective binding methods floating around. She's not using elastic/ace bandages, which are the particularly famous Bad Idea (they tighten as you breathe) but she is binding uncomfortably tight and for longer stretches of time that is healthy. (Not, incidentally, that this should be seen as some kind of Awful Failure on her part, because a) this is her way of dealing with dysphoria and many other things and b) she hasn't exactly got a genderqueer community to give her advice).
> 
>  **"blank cartridges"** \- This isn't anything to do with the story, but in my research for 'what would a Victorian call blanks' (you'll notice the answer was 'blanks' in one case, at least) I came across some [Edwardian pranks](http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2012/01/extraordinary-inventions-victorian-era.html). Enjoy.
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> This chapter is accidentally not the last chapter. The next chapter, please God, will be. Pray for me, delicious friends.


	6. "Pleasure to make your acquaintance."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter presented to the dreadful and delightful [mobiustrip](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mobiustrip) with my endless thanks and nervous apologies.
> 
> A note on sex: ...yeah
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> Warnings include the above, but also discussion of racism and some use of outdated/offensive language.

And then they drove to Baker Street.

Irene, against all expectations, kept her fingers twisted tightly and hotly with Holmes’, who hadn’t put her gloves back on after searching the mantelpiece. Not that that seemed to have happened recently; not, in fact, that it seemed to have happened to the same person who was now sitting in a hackney carriage with Irene Adler leaning just slightly closer than was proper against her shoulder, and her hand inexplicably clasped in hers.

There was red paint between their hands. It was cold, compared to the heat that Irene radiated. Irene’s thumb found Holmes’ palm and pressed there as if imparting a secret. Holmes was almost tempted to ask why Irene had taken her hand, but the real mystery was why Holmes hadn’t pulled away, and as much as she asked herself, all she could discover was the fact that she didn’t want to. That wasn’t an answer, of course; that was more akin to a child stamping its foot.

Anyway, she shrank from the idea of actually mentioning the fact that Irene’s hand was in hers, which was as laughable as it was true. She had fallen into the common hypocrisy of doing and not saying, she thought; or rather doing but not acknowledging. God, she was conventional, conventional, conventional, except when it mattered.

What would it be like to be one thing or the other?

Holmes sighed and stared out of the window at where London was dimming into a filmy, silver sort of evening. She still didn’t let go of Irene’s hand.

“I’m sorry.”

“Irrelevant, Miss Adler. You could hardly control what he was saying.”

“I’m sorry anyway.”

Four sentences exchanged, they fell back into silence. It was a long drive over a short distance, punctuated by nothing in particular. Holmes’ breaths flickered in her chest, struggling out of her throat, accompanied by quiet rattles. Her bandages, she thought, quite calmly, were much too tight. The air was blurring. She blinked, and tried to focus, but found she could only pin clarity to the world for a few seconds before colours started melting together again. “We’re nearly there,” Irene said softly. Holmes gave a sharp, irritable nod. She knew _that_. The rhythm of the cobbles was unmistakable, obvious as a signpost. It was everything else that was alien.

When they struggled up into the flat, the sitting room made no sense; there were still sandwiches on the table, and the box which Irene’s ensemble had come in was still by the coffee table. The window was open, letting in a breeze and snatches of cool evening chatter on the street outside. Horse hoofs rang out on the cobbles and someone cried out a greeting to a friend.

Everything was carrying on as normal, but it felt stretched thin, liable to crack at the lightest touch. Even the gaslight looked brittle. Irene stood at the centre of the room, clutching her shawl and looking about her like she’d never seen the place before. “Now what?” she asked finally. Holmes laughed. “What?”

What? Holmes shook her head. “Nothing,” she sighed, putting her hands on the back of her chair and bracing herself there, bowing her head. “You are—indefatigable, Miss Adler.”

“You misunderstand me. I’m hardly impatient to do it all again. I just—”

“You just fail to understand how the world can be so unaffected when your own inner life has undergone something akin to an earthquake.”

“I wish you wouldn’t so dissect me so calmly.”

“That was an extension of sympathy.”

“My mistake.”

Holmes stared down at the back of her chair, at her own sinewy, white-knuckled fingers and tried to work out if she was missing something, if it was really over, but there was something dull and heavy settled in her chest. A hand grasped her brain, squeezed it tight around the idea of her own fundamental wrongness, made her incapable of thinking about anything else.

“That’s two dresses ruined in one day,” Irene was saying, fussing with her clothes, trying to arrange her shawl over the red stain on her bodice. “How does this look?”

“I don’t know,” Holmes said.

“You’re not alright, are you.”

There didn’t seem to be any point in answering, so Holmes didn’t, just pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. No, she wasn’t alright. She never had been. She had been born to the left of alright and grown up in much the same way.

Irene was standing in front of her. Holmes could tell without looking.

“I shouldn’t stay,” she said, and her hand was on Holmes’ arm. She had taken off her paint-spattered gloves.

“You do a great number of things you shouldn’t, Miss Adler,” Holmes said, her voice hoarse.

“That was my point. I can hear how you’re breathing, you know.” So could Holmes. Air kept sticking and rattling in her throat. “Stop thinking. Undo those bandages. Have a smoke, have a drink, do something.”

“He could have spun the cylinder. You couldn’t know with any certainty that you would get the blank and Daalmans the real bullet.”

“I know. I had good odds, though. Stop thinking.”

“Your letters—”

“With Godfrey’s banker. We have time. She’ll wait for a slow news day. If she’s brave enough to publish them at all. Mr Holmes, please. Stop. Let me help you.”

“You can’t.”

“You’re saying things even you don’t believe.”

“Regrettably, no.” Holmes reached to push her to one side, and found her hands full, for a moment, of silk and velvet and skin-heat. It made her want to keep holding on; and run, too, at the same time. She reached her bedroom door and stumbled inside, shut it, leaned against it.

The room was quiet and still. Dark, now, but for the lamp in the corner which mainly served to produce shadows. It smelt, as it always did, of smoke and old pages and very little sleep. She could lock the door.

She _could_.

She could do anything she damn well wanted to and the facts would be the same.

Watson would still know. Irene Adler, who also knew, and who called her Mr Holmes despite everything, even in private, would still be standing in the living room just beyond the door.

Unless, of course, Holmes let her in. Or unless she left.

In fact, Holmes didn’t think she would be there for ten more minutes if she was kept waiting.

She peeled off her jacket, her waistcoat. Her back was bloody again, she knew. The lining of her waistcoat was purpled with blood. When she snapped off her collar and undid the top few buttons of her shirt, she saw that the skin above her breasts was bruised and worn thin, about to break. Her lungs were cramped, crushed up inside her. She ached. Christ, she ached.

She opened the door.

Irene Adler stood in the middle of the room, her back to Holmes. She had taken off her hat, revealing how her thick dark curls were swept with untidily up behind her head. Her shawl was draped over Holmes’ chair and the purple silk at the back of her neck was darkened in a single crescent of sweat right at the top of the high collar. As Holmes watched, she turned to meet her gaze. Holmes had to wonder what Daalmans had been talking about, saying she was beautiful on stage. She didn’t particularly care for Irene when she was acting.

But _now_. Now, Irene’s face was lined with exhaustion, crumpled with a kind of wild, tired triumph. She looked like she might burst her banks at any moment.

“You offered your help,” Holmes said, her voice hoarse, some of her words lost.

Irene’s face broke into a smile and she stepped forward, her hands steady on Holmes’ forearms as she steered them both back inside the bedroom, stopping to take the razor from beside the washbasin. “I did.”

Holmes sat on the edge of the narrow bed, her ruined shirt pulled down off her shoulders and tangled across her back, the sleeves about her forearms. Her head was bowed. The bandages came off quickly, Irene cutting them and Holmes peeling them away, and cold air caught in her throat, stung the sticky mess of bloodied cuts on her back, and Irene, thank God, said nothing sympathetic, nothing sweet, just left Holmes to cough and cough and gasp for air, clutching at the sheets of her bed.

The room swam, colours mixing and blurring, dripping down into each other; greying, brightening, greying again. She felt like someone was holding her head underwater. Her lungs were cold, spasming; whatever air she sucked down turned to shards of ice in her windpipe, tripping up her breathing again and making her flinch. Irene’s hand was at the back of Holmes’ neck, thumb pressing circles into taut muscle.

Holmes closed her eyes. After she had coughed herself hoarse, her shoulders shuddering, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and tried to breathe slowly. Irene’s fingers were still warm and pressing reassuringly hard at the back of her neck.

When she felt some of the pressure lessen, felt Irene preparing to pull away, Holmes reached up to keep her hand there.

They stayed like that, but Holmes could feel a hesitation hovering in Irene’s muscles. An unasked question. “Don’t move,” Holmes said.

“You know, it's strange. I'm not quite sure what you want from me.”

Holmes laughed, or tried; it got stuck in her chest. It should have been a relief, really, that Irene Adler didn’t know something. “Neither am I,” she said.

Irene leaned in, her front against Holmes’ back. Holmes supposed she wasn’t afraid of bloodying her dress, not now. Silk brushed against broken skin, and then Irene was kissing the corner of Holmes throat and shoulder with an open mouth, her left hand still on the back of Holmes’ neck as if holding her still, the other on Holmes’ upper arm.

A quiet, broken sound struggled out of Holmes’ throat.

Irene gripped tighter, as if keeping her there, and kissed her shoulder again with soft, mouthing movements. Holmes’ breath was making her chest shudder, her heart trying to hammer at her ribcage.

“Tell me to go, Sherlock,” Irene said, “and I will.”

Holmes lifted and turned her head, so that their cheeks brushed together, breath mingling the inches of air between their lips. Close enough for Holmes to catalogue each and every one of Irene’s eyelashes. “‘Sherlock’?” she said, after a long moment.

“What would you prefer I call you? Mr Holmes?” Irene whispered, a smile trembling on her face.

Holmes gave a single huff of laughter. “We have only known eachother for two days,” she pointed out.

“Yes,” Irene said, dropping her chin to Holmes’ shoulder with a sigh. Holmes turned her face away to look forward. “We have.”

They stayed quiet and still for some time, Irene still holding onto Holmes in a way Holmes couldn’t quite parse.

She tried to remember what had made the decision to stumble onto that sofa with Trevor, years ago, so easy. She hadn’t been drunk—she hadn’t been unaware of the complete idiocy of the idea—she hadn’t been able to detect within herself any symptom of love for him.

Actually, perhaps that last had helped. He had been such an utterly unromantic, friendly, playfully rough conquest, when not two years before, when she was still pretending to be Violet, people would have been telling her to let him court her, to blush, smile and eventually let marriage swallow her up.

Irene’s thumb was stroking her shoulder. “I want to,” Irene said. Holmes closed her eyes. “I’m tired and I hurt and I think I’ve got blood on me and I want to go to bed with you. What do you think, dear? We don’t have to. I can sleep in Dr Watson’s room.”

“Yes.”

“To which part?”

Holmes turned her head again, seeking out Irene’s mouth.

Irene was a stranger, really. And that was for the best. It didn’t matter. They were already deviants. No one was expecting anything more, no one was expecting anything less, no one was expecting anything because it was just them, here, now, and the door was closed against the rest of the world. It wasn’t like she was Watson, looking for someone to marry, or even Trevor, looking for whatever Trevor had been looking for in her, she just—Irene knew. Irene knew and was touching her.

Kissing her, actually. Kissing her deeply and with her mouth open, and with a kind of relief crashing over both of them, and then Holmes was panting, panting into the side of Irene’s throat like she hadn’t panted in years, _years_ , if she’d ever panted like this before. Her chest was exploding in pain.

“So you _have_ kissed someone,” Irene gasped above her, fingers twisting in Holmes’ short hair, clenching over and over against her scalp. “ _You_. You’ve _kissed_ someone.”

Holmes’ laughter crackled in her throat. “Only one person,” she said into the curve of Irene’s shoulder, her breath dampening the material of Irene’s dress, “and only perhaps five times.”

“Someone made you lose count?”

Holmes dragged her into another open-mouthed kiss to stop her from saying anything else. She was leaning back, supported by one trembling arm. Her breasts, sitting flat and hard against her body, were bare, her bandages littered bloodily across the bed with the razor, Irene’s gloves, all these things, these meaningless things which came between everything and everything else. She was gasping. Already couldn’t breath. Irene was wearing French perfume under the smell of ashes and blood and paint. Holmes’ shirt was still tangled around her back, off her shoulders, collar hanging off and her cuffs still on, one hand on Irene’s face; and then Irene pulled away from her mouth to kiss breathlessly at her palm, to scrape her teeth at the heel of Holmes’ hand like she was trying to gnaw her way into her.

Holmes clenched her teeth and _hissed_.

“My God,” said Irene in a hot rush against the inside of Holmes’ hand. Her eyes were shut, her lashes splayed out darkly against the dark circles which had been there since this morning, so long ago. She hadn’t slept last night: and Holmes lost that thought when Irene licked up her palm and sucked her index finger into her mouth.

And then that collided with how Trevor had said _halfway down my throat, God I know it’s filthy_ , years ago now, and Holmes gasped. Irene sucked her harder into her mouth, tongue pressing against the whorls of fingerprints and ragged violin calluses at the pad of Holmes’ fingertip. Her cheeks went hollow.

Holmes ripped her hand away and caught Irene’s mouth with her own again, sucking on her lower lip. Pulling away. Gasping. She couldn’t get enough air into her lungs. “Do you know,” Holmes said against her cheek, “what you want—”

“Yes, you,” Irene said, and licked Holmes’ lower lip.

Holmes started, and had to try twice to say, “Get up. Turn.”

It was a relief to be able to get her breath back. It had been a long time since Holmes had undone a dress, and she had never tried it from this angle. It was easier like this, she discovered; from the back and without disgust.

She had thought, for some reason, that the moment she slowed down, had to do something methodical and calm, she would come to her senses and shove Irene out of her bedroom and never see her again. She didn’t. Irene stood before the bed facing away from Holmes and Holmes unbuttoned her, peeling layers off her. Irene helped by unpinning her hair and then pulling it over her shoulder to keep it out of Holmes’ way, sucking in her breath and unclasping her corset at the front—then laughing suddenly. “What is it?”

“Cotton underthings. Your landlady—” Holmes could Irene’s laughter vibrate through her. “If I promise that I prefer silk, will you promise to imagine me _wearing_ silk?”

For a moment, Holmes didn’t understand what she meant. Then slowly, slowly, she caved in, leaning forwards with her hands on Irene’s hips and resting her forehead against Irene’s back, shaking with silent laughter. Her breath sent cotton fluttering against Irene’s skin. It was a few moments before she could say, “I really, Miss Adler, _really_ , could not care less.”

“Good.”

“ _Yes_.”

Irene turned, and looked down at Holmes, both of them still trembling with laughter, and something in Holmes’ throat clenched at the idea of been looked at and seen. It made her skin prickle and her laughter fade into something heady and less easy. She gripped Irene’s hips harder for a second, fingertips pushing cotton into warm dimples of flesh, and then she dropped her hands, pulling her shirt back onto her shoulders to cover the twin heavy weights of her breasts.

Irene stepped away, and for a moment Holmes stiffened; she shouldn’t have called attention to her flattened breasts, or she shouldn’t have revealed them in the first place, or—but Irene was just crossing to the lamp. Holmes shook her head and licked her lips, feeling giddy and raw and half-terrified, inappropriate laughter still trying to trip up her breathing. Irene dropped a handful of hairpins onto Holmes’ dressing table. Holmes got one last glimpse of her from the back, with the light of the lamp trapped for a moment between the cottony swell of her hip and her bare elbow; and then Irene plunged them into darkness.

“Better?” Irene’s voice was liquid in the dark.

“Yes.”

“Good.” Irene still had her boots on, and her heels clicked on the floorboards as she stepped closer. Their breathing interrupted the dark. They located each other by heat, noise, reaching out blindly, and then Irene came tumbling down onto the narrow bed with Holmes, who moved backwards to make space for her. She heard her bootheel knock against the wall, then felt her hands on her ribcage, _warm_.

“Tell me where you were born,” Holmes said suddenly.

“New Orleans,” Irene said, pressing closer. “Louisiana. Year of our Lord, 1856.”

Holmes was sitting on the bed with Irene kneeling up between her spread, bent legs, so that her knees were knocking against Irene’s ribcage, with the heat from Irene’s hands and the scent of her skin soaking right through her. Holmes was gripping her hips again. “Your real name.”

“ _Your_ real name.” Irene moved her hands away from Holmes’ sides and gave a kind of stretch. Holmes heard cotton whisper, and then Irene’s bare breasts were pressed, warm and soft, against Holmes’ chest.

Holmes pressed her face into the thick coils of Irene’s hair to stop herself from groaning aloud, her fingers tightening on Irene’s hips. She was right, of course. Holmes didn’t need to know if she had ever been anything other than what she was at that moment, pressed against her. Irene felt real. Present. Hot and grasping, living and beating and thrumming there against her, her mouth at Holmes’ shoulder again. Holmes’ nerves exploded. “Reasonable counter-argument,” she gasped. “It’s Sherlock Holmes.”

“And mine is Irene Adler,” Irene replied. “Ask a better question.”

Irene’s hand were on either side of Holmes’ face now. Their mouths met in the dark, Holmes’ teeth finding Irene’s lower lip. Claustrophobic, this. Hands and mouths everywhere, limbs everywhere. Knees in unlikely places, muscles stretching and straining. It was good, cramped, disorganised, hungry. Holmes was shivering. “—women?”

“That isn’t a question.”

“Yes, it is.”

Irene was squirming against her, rolling her hips; Holmes had never seen a woman like this, never seen a woman do this, and she wanted to bite, growl, snarl, give in to the awful animal side of her which she’d just barely been aware of with Trevor. She was light-headed. “Yes,” Irene said, “yes, women, and men, too. All sorts. Why, should you like me to tell you about them?”

“No,” Holmes said, closing her eyes tight, and what to do with her _hands_ , dear _God_ , except try and drag Irene closer, “no, don’t.”

“Then why ask?”

Holmes gave up on questions suddenly and abruptly, falling back onto the bed and pulling Irene down with her. Her back lit up in a blaze of pain, broken skin rubbing against her shirt and the sheets beneath. It didn’t matter. She was kissing Irene again. Irene’s fingers were in Holmes’ hair and: oh. Yes. Holmes’ legs were spread, Irene between them.

Holmes’ head dropped back, breath coming short.

No. Damn it. Not like this. Suddenly she rolled, pinning Irene beneath her. Irene hissed in her breath through her teeth as her wrist smacked against against the wall. The bed was too narrow, the bedsprings beneath them creaking as they moved. Holmes’ mouth was at the corner of Irene’s jaw and throat, Irene’s fingernails digging into her shoulders, scraping and scratching. Getting in. Inside.

Christ they were close, knocking together and scrabbling for purchase on each other’s bodies.

“Are you thinking?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t. This woman you kissed—”

“Man,” Holmes said, “it was a man—we were nineteen,” though why she was saying as much she didn’t know. She sounded like she was pleading extenuating circumstances.

“A man? My God.” Irene had stopped still for a second, panting. Holmes tensed up, the muscles in her shoulders bunching tightly together.

“What?” she asked, pulling back, but then Irene was snatching her back down and their noses were knocking together and she could tell, though it was dark, that Irene’s teeth were bared.

“Shh. You needn’t assume the worst. I’m just imagining you and a man,” Irene said, her voice low and hungry. “I’m imagining your hands on, mm, somebody’s prick, both of you in creased shirtsleeves and—” and here the hand not in Holmes’ hair squeezed at her bicep, fingernails pressing in sharp crescents “—tearing at each other, those muscles—are you different with men?”

“I—” Holmes’ mind was spiralling, her breath jumping in her chest, half caught by Irene’s fantasy and half distracted by being here, Irene’s mouth not moments away from hers. They were meant to—they had agreed to sleep together. Not to dissect their respective deviant histories. Did it matter? And did she know the answer? “I don’t know.”

“I am.”

“Now I have to ask,” Holmes said, but Irene licked what she had to had to ask right out of her mouth, her fingers clenched in Holmes’ hair, macassar oil sliding between her fingers, a sticky, melted rivulet slipping down the back of Holmes’ neck and mixing with the beads of sweat there, then further down, where it hit streaks of blood.

“What,” Irene said against the corner of her mouth, her other hand sliding to strange places on Holmes’ body, absurd and innocuous places; her stomach, for instance, where Irene circled her navel, pressing her fingertips against hard muscle, made her stiffen and tremble against her hand. “What do you have to ask?”

“What are you like with me?”

Irene’s fingers snuck to the button of Holmes’ trousers. “Let’s see.”

Holmes froze, the world coming into focus.

Irene’s fingers. Between her legs. She wanted it and she was terrified of wanting it. They had agreed, of course. It was absurd to stop now. “Wait,” she said. Irene stopped, her fingertips on Holmes’ quivering stomach, just above the fastenings of her trousers. Holmes screamed at herself in her own mind, her teeth clenched with frustration and her arms trembling with the effort of propping herself up, fingers twisted uselessly in the sheets. “Wait.”

“I will.”

“I...”

“We can do something else—”

“Don’t pander to me.”

“Do you think I _pander_ to anyone?” Irene gripped Holmes’ chin suddenly with the hand not turned up against Holmes’ stomach, the pad of her thumb pressing gently and firmly against Holmes’ lower lip. “Do you think I am so tedious and small-minded that I can only think of one way to bed you? That I’d stick to a plan _here_ , with you _here_ , and drag you along with it no matter what because it’s the only thing I want from you? Mr Holmes, _we can do something else_.”

Holmes’ breath shuddered. There was nothing in her mind except how Irene’s thumb felt against her lip, and how Irene’s hipbones were digging into the insides of her thighs. They didn’t fit; they cut into each other at unlikely, intimate angles, and it was good, better than Holmes could have ever expected it to be. Irene said, “Yes?” and Holmes said, “Yes,” and Irene opened Holmes’ mouth with her thumb and kissed her upper lip, left her gasping and wanting. She mouthed at Irene’s knuckles, bit down against the bone, and made Irene growl somewhere close by in the dark.

Something else, then. They could—they would—do something else. Possibilities fanned out, made Holmes breathless.

She slid down Irene’s body, stretching like a cat, arms taut and fingers still tight in the sheets as she explored with her mouth, ran her nose up Irene’s sternum and pressed her cheek to the swell of her left breast, rolling one of Irene’s nipples in her mouth until it was hard and swollen against her tongue. Irene rippled and pulled at Holmes’ hair, then shoved one of her hands down between the bloody mess of Holmes’ back and the ruined cotton of her shirt.

It hurt, and Holmes let herself yell, muffling it in Irene’s chest and panting not at the pain but at the fact that she had cried out so easily. Irene gasped, stopped, but Holmes said, “There’s nothing wrong,” still shocked, feeling suddenly almost as if she was falling and then Irene was back to pushing her nails along Holmes’ scalp while Holmes clutched the sheets into whirlpools of wrinkles and thought wildly that she wanted Irene to claw her apart.

She rolled her shoulders, moved backwards and collapsed between Irene’s legs, having released the cotton of the sheets to grab at the cotton of Irene’s drawers, feeling the heat of Irene’s skin beneath. “Jesus,” Irene said, a punctuation mark far above in the dark and Holmes just gave a single breath of laughter against her inner thigh, feeling drunk, her blood thick with wanting. Her throat was full of a need she couldn’t name.

Irene threw a leg over Holmes’ shoulder almost callously, her fingers clutching at Holmes’ hair again, pulling it out of order, and Holmes’ hand knocked hers in the dark as they both searched for the buttons on Irene’s drawers. Irene said, “I think at the side—” and then they were laughing again, and it hurt Holmes’ chest. The bed shook to the rhythm of their gasping laughter, the springs squeaking, and it was Holmes, in the end, who found the buttons at Irene’s hip, Holmes who pushed the cotton away to get at Irene’s skin and Holmes who lowered her mouth down between Irene’s legs as Irene said, “The great Sherlock Holmes,” on a breath that was wrenched like a sob.

She tasted rich and dark and Holmes buried her nose in the thick curls above her sex and moaned into her. For a few moments she tried to think in anatomy, diagrams, medical terminology, but it was all lost somewhere in how Irene was slippery and pushing against her mouth, how Holmes found herself licking up and heard Irene say, “Oh.”

Two days. One fire. One death. And here they were, littering secrets, stumbling into one another and sighing against skin and kissing and licking, or Holmes was kissing and licking, exploring what made Irene’s hips lift up and shudder, what made her try to shove her sex against Holmes’ tongue, what made her moan and dig her bootheels into Holmes’ back. Here they were, wetness smeared across Holmes’ lips and chin and cheeks. And Irene Adler moaned when she was being licked like this.

Data. Discovery. Holmes didn’t care, just freed her hand from where it was trapped between Irene’s thigh and the sheets, brushed her two fingers lightly over the edges of Irene’s inner lips, up slowly, down slowly, exploring her, sliding—could she? yes—her index finger inside her.

Irene burned to the touch. Holmes had her swollen clitoris against her tongue, two fingers moving in and out of her now, and she was boiling, sweating down here between Irene’s thighs, waves of arousal pulsing through her every time she made Irene move, every time Irene yanked at her hair and worst of all, best of all, every time Irene said her name, an easy, thoughtless chant of _Holmes_ and _Sherlock_ and, “Dear man, dear girl—”

Holmes didn’t mean to make the sound she made. But there she was, shaking and—

(could she, could she do this)

—pushing her free hand down, undoing her trousers, grinding down against her own fingers. Yes. God. Yes. Her hips rolled, her mouth slipped and Irene dragged her back into place by her hair, sending shocks of pain right through her; she curled the fingers which were deep inside Irene’s body, three fingers now, pushing Irene _open_ and then Irene collided with her climax, clenching and clawing at Holmes’ scalp and saying nonsense, glorious nonsense, at the top of her voice.

Holmes listened to her breathing slow, the fingers of her left hand still tucked illicitly between her legs, the fingers of her right still illicitly between Irene’s. Slowly she extricated both hands, and sat up.

She could still taste her. She was on her lips, her tongue. She was in her bed. She was much too close. And Holmes could still feel her own arousal thudding in her veins. She felt raw, not just because Irene's nails had left her skin burning.

“Stop thinking,” said Irene, her voice ragged and rich with open tenderness, and Holmes collapsed down with an aching, untidy relief, half on top of her, understanding that they weren’t done.

Kisses. More of them. Slow, slight, delicate at first, Holmes uncertain and caught between admiration and surprise as the way in which Irene nuzzled at her lower lip assured her that Irene was enjoying the taste of herself. Somewhere, the exhausted, clumsy eagerness in Irene’s kisses became infectious. It felt almost easy, this. It couldn’t have been late yet, Holmes thought, but she didn’t know what time it could be; it felt like an unreal early morning hour, blue and black and full of shapes and sounds but nothing intelligible to anyone except them, and even then, only sometimes. It couldn’t have been later than nine.

Hilarious, to imagine how a doctor might categorise this, strange to think that this was what they were trying to explain in sparse, ugly paragraphs of scientific terminology—but Irene’s fingers smoothed across Holmes’ temple, and she didn’t have to tell her to stop thinking.

Kisses. More of them. Deeper now, while that unknowing need ached between Holmes’ lungs and made her lose her breath in Irene’s mouth. Irene, who knew. Who called her dear man and dear girl in the same wild, overflowing breath like it didn’t matter and probably, probably didn’t remember doing it. Irene who. Irene.

“What are you like with me?”

“Loud. Honest.”

Holmes pressed her cheek to Irene’s upper arm, and Irene tightened her grip on her. The bed was too narrow for them, really, and Holmes’ skin felt too thin for this. Outside, distantly, horses clattered and people spoke, oblivious to this little first floor room and everything it contained. Apparently, the noise from outside caught Irene’s attention too, because she said with a peculiar, wrung-out humour, “Do you think this now counts as the most deviant bed in London?”

“You have the typical American naivete about London’s depravity.”

They spoke quietly, though if Irene crying out hadn’t disturbed anyone, there was no way speaking at a normal volume could do any damage. It simply didn’t feel right to speak up; they were close enough to hear each other perfectly well.

Holmes closed her eyes and felt Irene’s chest rise and fall, her hand resting on her sternum. Irene stroked over her knuckles, and then picked up Holmes’ hand from her chest and brought it to her lips. Holmes lay there, heart thudding, letting her do what she liked.

Irene sucked her fingertips, kissed her palm, made her shift and almost push against her, trying to keep her breath inside her chest instead of stumbling out of her mouth in gasps and muffled moans. Irene flicked her tongue in—absurd place, really—the valley between two of Holmes’ fingers.

“Mr Holmes?”

“Yes?”

“Didn’t you have the fingers of your _right_ hand inside me?”

And she was right, of course, because Holmes was lying on her right side, her head in the crook of Irene’s elbow, her right hand pinned beneath her at an awkward but not uncomfortable angle, and Irene was licking her left hand—the hand with which she’d been touching herself as she mouthed at Irene, feeling illicit, fervent, not getting anywhere, not even approaching climax, just needing to give in to some of the want which had been hammering, which still hammered, between her legs.

“Ah,” Holmes said.

“You _delight_ me,” Irene said with a dizzy fervency, just like she’d said when she’d lured Holmes out to meet her, except this time she turned and pressed the words into Holmes’ mouth, a kind of pained urgency in her voice as if she wasn’t really saying that, she was saying something else, something Holmes couldn’t understand and could only barely detect. Holmes turned her face away, and Irene stilled. “Should I stop?”

“No. No, don’t move.”

“Well,” Irene said, slowly curling her fingers into the gaps between Holmes’. “You have my arm trapped. But even if I could, I wouldn’t much like to.”

In the dark, Holmes gave a gasp of laughter and then clenched her teeth and closed her eyes and finally, finally let herself drop her head back down to Irene’s shoulder. Let herself breathe. She was light-headed, unsure of what she wanted and startled to discover that whatever it was, she could have it. She realised suddenly that this was what people were referring to when they spoke about to being in somebody else’s arms.

“One would think,” Holmes said, exhausted, aloud, that aching open desire in her throat making her words raspy, “that something so popular would be more convenient.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The bed is too narrow for this. We both still have our boots on, I soon won’t be able to feel my right hand and you’ve said nothing, but you’ve already lost sensation all along your left arm.”

“You told me not to move.”

“I'm aware,” Holmes said. “Don’t.” And she lifted her head and found Irene’s mouth in the dark.

She could promise herself that another time, another night, they would try other things, and then she could sleep like this, tangled up in Irene’s limbs—more from exhaustion than from trust, admittedly, but sleep was sleep. She could feel it waiting for her, yawning darkly somewhere beneath the ache in her lungs, the gaping want, the thudding arousal trying to fill out every empty space inside her.

But it would be different in the morning.

Holmes pulled away and dropped her head down, breathing against the hollow of Irene’s throat, feeling Irene’s lungs expand and contract beneath her in slow, steady movements. Irene stroked the back of Holmes’ neck. Perhaps she didn’t remember that she’d scratched it raw while Holmes’ face had been between her legs.

Irene dug her fingers in, and Holmes reevaluated that idea, keeping herself silent by pressing down, burying her face somewhere in the vicinity of Irene’s clavicle, controlling her own breaths.

“That,” she said, “do that,” and Irene pressed her nails into the muscle of Holmes’ shoulder.

Holmes moaned through clenched teeth.

“Oh,” said Irene, “that’s fascinating,” and she left four long scratches scored across Holmes’ shoulderblades, making Holmes shudder and try to grab onto her.

“Yes,” Holmes said, “yes, it’s.” She couldn’t come up with words. “Yes.”

“So that’s what thrills Sherlock Holmes. Getting scratched bloody.”

“I,” Holmes said into her throat, having to push the words out of her mouth, so that they tumbled untidily into the space between her lips and Irene’s throats. “Anything. I think. Anything painful.”

“You think?”

“It hasn’t been overly relevant before.”

Irene lifted her chin up and kissed her thoroughly, pushing her fingertips through her hair. “Sit back. I need room to sit up.”

“Why?”

“So that you can sit up with me and get your hand down your drawers.”

“ _Christ_.”

The next few moments passed in flashes. Teeth on Holmes’ bicep, fingers digging tight into her ribs, Irene’s hair sweeping past her face as she sat up, knees knocking elbows knocking hips, wrists, mouths, fingers, tongues, teeth, more teeth, nails.

Then Irene was up on her knees, her back against the headboard and her hands in Holmes’ hair again, while Holmes had a knee on each side of her, their chests and their mouths crushed together. Irene dug her nails in. Holmes braced herself against the headboards, fingernails grating against the iron. Her other hand was shoved between her legs, inside her undone trousers.

And those sounds in the air, those muffled growls and bitten-off grunts, she was making those, wasn’t she?

It would be different in the morning. Thank God. Holmes shoved her face into Irene’s hair as Irene sank her teeth into the muscle of her shoulder and muffled a desperate whine, her mind white with pain and want, this broken-open need to reverberating through her like something gone mad.

She had two fingers inside herself down to the knuckle and she was bearing down against the heel of her hand, the headboard scraping at the wallpaper and the bedsprings gasping every time she moved, and moved, and moved again, shoving forwards, against Irene, against her own fingers. And Irene was kissing her and biting and she could taste copper in her mouth, a sharp bloom of blood and a wash of pain. And she was groaning, snarling into Irene’s mouth and there were Irene’s fingers in her hair and sliding down the back of her trousers and digging in her _nails_.

She hadn’t been expecting, really, to orgasm, and so it took her by shaking, reeling surprise when it hit her and she _felt_ it, racking waves of blank sensation, clenching muscles and wild panting and boots slipping against sheets and tearing pleasure and no thought: no thought at all.

Holmes slumped against Irene. Her hand dropped from the headboard. A silence settled deep down inside her and spread out through her. She felt her muscles spasm. Again. And again.

God she hurt.

Slowly they slid downwards, Holmes feeling like she was falling through dark air and being pulled back into her own body, over and over again, by Irene’s hands. Her face dropped into Irene’s throat. She was shaking. She definitely hadn’t shaken like this before.

“Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Irene said and Holmes was laughing, laughing helplessly into Irene’s skin, both of them shaking with it and making the bed shake too as they lay tangled up atop the covers.

*

The sun lay in slices across the bed, and the whole building smelt of breakfast. Holmes greeted the day coughing.

When her lungs were clear, she dropped back onto her pillow and squeezed her eyes shut until she was breathing slowly and without too much of a rasp in her chest. Then she cracked her eyes open to stare hazily at the wall—at her shadow on the wallpaper, the flecks of dust which floated in the stripes of light coming through the window. For a few clean, quiet moments, there was nothing in the world.

In truth, the facts were on a slightly smaller scale. The world wasn’t empty, but her bed was. Irene Adler had left.

Slowly, Holmes moved to sit up. The motion smashed the world into tiny jagged particles, most of which got stuck behind her eyes. She grimaced. She grimaced with her whole body, because her whole body was what ached.

She was wearing yesterday’s trousers. Boots. Scratches. Teeth marks. And a strand of long black hair was caught in her fingers. Slowly, she unwound it, and then, feeling absurd and dull and unaccountably disappointed though she had neither expected nor wanted anything more, dropped it, because it was simply a strand of hair.

After the world had resettled and was—Holmes’ lip curled—pretending once more to be sedate, softly-lit and in a state of not-quite afternoon, she pulled off her boots and put her feet on the floorboards, standing up. The light from the window flared too bright and too yellow at the corner of her eyes and her knees went, and then she was sitting heavily back down on the edge of her bed, elbows on her knees, head swimming and lungs starving. It was a moment before she could choke down air to her own satisfaction.

Her razor was at her feet. So were last night’s bloodied bandages and her ruined shirt with its cuffs still attached. Irene’s clothes, Holmes assumed, were with Irene.

Holmes was perfectly aware of the white envelope sitting quietly and apologetically on her dressing table, but she wasn’t even going to think about opening it now, when even breathing was a struggle.

She wasn’t.

Of course, everything was always going to be different come morning. She had known that. That had been the only reason she had allowed last night to happen at all. It was a good thing that it was over. No one could do that with any regularity.

She tried her legs again, and this time they held her.

Slowly, Holmes turned, surveying the room as if it were the scene of a crime.

A buttonhook lay on the dressing table; borrowed from Mrs Hudson yesterday and rescued, Holmes assumed, from Watson’s room, where Irene had left it. She had dressed in here, hooking and clasping herself into respectability, hiding all manner of sins under the cotton underwear Holmes hadn’t understood her distaste for.

And she had had left hair tangled, not just in Holmes’ fingers, but in the teeth of her comb. She had used Holmes’ macassar oil, too, to smooth her hair and hold her curls. Her hairpins were no longer in a heap on the dressing table.

For a moment Holmes listened—but she wasn’t outside the door, and Holmes hadn’t expected her to be.

In the sitting room, Holmes knew—sliding off her trousers, kicking them aside—Irene’s shawl would be gone, and so would her hat. She would be conspicuously absent. So Holmes wrapped herself in her dressing gown and avoided looking at the chair before the empty grate as she crossed the sitting room and strode up the stairs to the bathroom.

She ran a bath, listened to the pipes creak, then immersed herself, her eyes closed to how the hot water made the scratches all over her shoulders, her back, her neck, flush deeper in angry stripes of red and pink.

Her knuckles were white on the roll-top edge. She made herself soak.

Then she dripped water all the way back to her room, dressing gown clinging to her wet skin. She combed her hair back and dried herself off before wrapping bandages around her torso like she did every morning, loose enough, today, to accommodate her tender breasts and the way her lungs were still struggling to open up to all the air she wanted.

She dressed, adjusted her cravat before the mirror, and finally lit a cigarette.

And then, properly attired, the very image of a man, she continued to ignore the envelope, picking up instead what was next to it: the purse which the Prince of Wales had left, containing ten thousand pounds, some of which had gone towards Irene Adler’s new dress—though not enough to warrant how light it was now.

Holmes’ lips thinned out. She undid the purse, poured the money out onto the desk and flicked her eyes over it, and then, after a moment of shock, of neither knowing nor understanding what she felt, she burst out laughing; Irene Adler had split the proceeds of the case perfectly down the middle.

When her shoulders had stopped shaking and she could control her features once more, she finally turned to face the envelope. It was bulky, filled with more than just paper. She sliced it open with the razor which Irene had used to remove her bandages last night.

Exactly as expected, diamonds spilled out into her palm and scattered sunlight across the room.

It was a necklace; the necklace, Holmes supposed, that Irene had been keeping in her safe along with her letters and photograph. It spilled through Holmes’ fingers like sparkling liquid, splintering sunlight. She put it down, laughing again, dropping it onto the dressing table and turning her attention to the letter which Irene Adler had written to her—though before she could properly take it out of the envelope, she looked back at the diamond necklace, glinting there in front of her own reflection. Her mouth quirked, and she shook her head.

“A very great pleasure to make your acquaintance, indeed,” Holmes said.

 

*

MY DEAR MR SHERLOCK HOLMES,

I have your blood under my nails.

Forgive me. I had planned to start this letter by saying that I hope you slept well, but that would be both deceitful and pointless, given the fact that I am currently watching you do just that. So I wrote the first thing I could think of and, unfortunately, it was that. But it is written now.

I write to say goodbye, of course. No doubt you have already realised as much. By the time you read this—depending on when you wake up—I shall either be picking up my letters and my photograph from Godfrey’s banker, or I shall be (I hope fast asleep) on the train to—well, I can’t say. In truth I do not yet know. I have not felt so free to get lost in quite some time.

I owe you my thanks, and, suspecting you will care little for them, have decided to offer them with an explanation which seeks not to excuse my behaviour but make it understandable to you. I think you might appreciate that more than a plea for forgiveness.

So, shall I tell you the truth?

I said, I believe, that Godfrey does not care for what she cannot sell. This was a misrepresentation. The truth is that Godfrey is adoring, unselfishly devoted and entirely faithful to a version of myself which does not exist. I misled her, without a doubt, in the early days of our liaison, but she filled in the spaces I left with her own inventions and assumptions.This imagined Irene Adler of hers was born in New Jersey, to parents—white parents, I might add—now dead. She dragged herself up tooth and nail, certainly; she did unsavoury things which numerous women would balk at and for good reason; but she was forced by circumstance, and she felt the scars. She was a singer and an actress and a painter (a little known fact) but what she loved most in the world was Godfrey Norton; her art was given meaning by Godfrey Norton.

Some people, you see, cannot love unless they hold the object of that love clenched in their palm. Grip is, to them, the means of expressing adoration. It is not necessarily a flaw; there are those who believe that to be loved is to be stuck fast, and are happy that way. It was only chance that I should be so fundamentally opposed to being held still.

Why did I not rebel sooner, you ask? I did—I tried—but sometimes I wished to be this woman she thought I was. She seemed very happy; she seemed very good, shining through her sin, so totally, thankfully unlike the woman I had been in Warsaw. And she was loved enormously.

So: Godfrey loved a fiction. This is important because she was prepared to go to great lengths to protect that fiction. I told her, vaguely, of my plans for revenge, in order to try and make her realise who I am and how I work—though I admittedly implied it was nothing but a compromising photograph.

Telling her was a mistake; of course it was alright in the end, as you shall see, but it was a mistake at the time. In Godfrey’s opinion, the woman she loved would never have been so vicious, no matter how she had been wronged in the past. Convinced I was doing myself wrong, betraying myself—debasing myself?—she plotted to steal the photograph in order to protect me from my own plans for revenge. In her mind, she was saving me from myself.

I had known of her plan for quite some time. I would have been blind not to notice where Godfrey went almost every day—and who she went to meet. I was sure, however, that it was she who was manipulating Alexandre and not the other way around. Well: we know how wrong that proved to be.

I was terrified up until exactly three days ago. Bertie was on one side of me; Godfrey was on another. When either would strike, I could not be sure. How they would do it, I could not be sure. Bertie, dear Prince, sent people to break into my flat, to waylay me on the road; I was shoved, slapped, searched, broken-in upon. My lady’s maid was nearly torn apart. As for Godfrey, I could see her mouth twist, her brow darken. I could see how she looked in the direction of my safe. I wrote her a letter trying to reveal to her the truth of my character, making myself out to be even worse than I am, trying to rip her free from me. And she refused to entertain the idea.

It is shockingly strange and shockingly lonely, to discover a deep, stumbling and uncrossable chasm of understanding between you and someone for whom your love is just as deep, stumbling and uncrossable as what separates you. Though I admit I am confused by her now. The thing is, I hardly think she can ever have loved me; she loved somebody who would be happy in her hand, not me.

You. Are not that interested in my vulnerabilities. Most people, you see, want to believe that they can give me something; most people want to save me. You, I think, are more interested in what I can do for myself. So let us return to that.

I made some preparations, insofar as I could. Counting on Godfrey’s genius for predictability, I won over her banker. You would probably like to me detail some grand confidence trick here, or a long, false seduction, but (my apologies for the lack of romanticism) what I actually did was pay him. You see I have no proper standing in good society and no clean reputation; but I have a great deal of money and so I find myself well-placed to use it without shame.

Of course through all this I was aware of a coming storm, for I had been warned that Sherlock Holmes was likely to be put on the case. What a laugh that was—after all, had I not, in the months after the Théâtre burned, when I drifted through life occasionally wondering if I hadn’t escaped the flames after all, if perhaps I was in fact just a ghost—had I not then considered consulting Sherlock Holmes myself to gain some kind of resolution to the questions which tormented me?

Facts are a noose, aren’t they? Facts are so difficult to get around. Before I met you, I so desperately did not want to come up against your logic. I was worried you might be right about me, and worried you might be wrong about me; and I also suspected you would like to lock me up, which was admittedly a more pressing concern. It is very strange to me that what should have so frightened me at first, I now number amongst your many charms. You see things as they are; I am grateful for that, and thrilled by that, and truth me told I want more of that.

But I cannot linger; this is not a billet-doux. I am not entirely sure what it is, I must admit, but let us carry on with the story.

When you finally got yourself tangled up in my affairs, I knew I had to act. You know I hate hiding from storms. I’d rather be stealing the lightning, given half a chance.

Your stunt with the smoke rocket rather spurred things on and I realised I couldn’t do anything if I was paralysed by fear. Better to dash myself against the rocks trying to scramble to safety than to give in and let the waves drag me down with no resistance. So I took a chance. And I finally asked you to take my case.

I came home from our little walk that night and thankfully had time to get ready for bed before Godfrey arrived, for heaven knows what she would have made of my walking clothes. I was just brushing out my hair when she arrived—with open arms—of course I crashed into them for the second time that day and, somewhere in my confused narrative of events, I intimated to her that I would release the photograph immediately—at once—tomorrow. “First thing tomorrow”.

Hours later I felt her weight lift from the bed beside me. This was not in itself unusual; we both agreed that for my servants to know of our liaison was one thing, but to make them witnesses would be another. Godfrey often left under cover of darkness. She kissed my hair, whispered her love. I waited, frozen, until she I had heard the back door open and close; I waited after that, almost too afraid of what I might find in that safe to move. After all, if it was full, Godfrey was trustworthy but I would have to find some other way to avoid handing over my letters to you; and if it was empty, I would safe from your clutches for the time being, but Godfrey was no longer on my side.

By now, of course, you know what I found. She had taken the letters and the photograph, leaving just the necklace—the necklace enclosed with this letter. I left it in the safe for the time being and made myself go back to bed. It may entertain you to know that I very nearly ruined everything for myself by sleeping in; I failed to rest until at least five in the morning, for it was light when I finally got to sleep. I had been meaning to get up at six—instead, I rolled out of bed at half past seven, scrambling desperately for my clothes, scrawling my letter to you as Beth dressed my hair and I tried to keep my eyes open. Then I bundled myself hurriedly into a hackney carriage (my landau is—was, I suppose—charming but obvious—of course, poor John must have seen me go, and realised then that it was time to try his hand at theft) and I believe that I passed Bertie’s brougham on my way down to Baker Street.

Baker Street! “I don’t have them,” I said to you there. Well; it was technically true. And then, despite everything you had said to me, you took my case without taking my letters.

Why did I deceive you? Well, I have quite simple wants, but they are on a very grand scale. I wanted two things which seemed impossible to resolve: to keep the photograph and the letters under my control, and to employ your skill in answering questions which have haunted me this past year.

Thank you, Mr Holmes. Doesn’t it sound hollow on paper? Thank you, dear. I would rather not talk of Alexandre here. Will you excuse that? Well, you will have to. I, after all, am the one writing.

Returning to the letters, which I hope will be (as you read this) neatly tucked away in my luggage, you may inform Bertie that he may do what he likes with no hindrance from one whom he has cruelly wronged. Between you and me, Mr Holmes, I am satisfied to have scared him. This is not the milder, sweeter nor more honourable option; I enjoy the idea of him being constantly afraid of discovery, never knowing when his luck might turn and I might, on a whim, ruin him. Do you not agree? Well—whatever you think, do not sanitise me in your memory. Detest my faults; as for my better traits, well, you may do what you like with them. My only demand is that you think of me honestly. Godfrey and Alexandre deluded themselves and built me up until they were convinced I was a saint and look what that did to them, and to me. So please, if you care for me at all, be unsentimental and see me as I am.

Now to the necklace; my gift to you. It would be rather unfair of me to think too hardly of John for what he tried to do; after all, it was stolen property long before he put his hand to it. It belonged to Agata Maypin, wife of Richard Maypin, who managed my operatic career up until my flight from Warsaw. I stole it, amongst many other things I have since sold on, preferring honestly to, well, possess my own possessions. It was an act of necessity; and of revenge, although that revenge, too, was necessary. I felt very powerful that day, striding off bedecked in Mrs Maypin’s finery, with Mr Maypin’s cash stowed about my person.

You see, no one else was going to help me. I had made a grievous mistake with Bertie. I told him some of the truth, I think because I was so excited to talk English to somebody who wasn’t Mr Maypin or one of his cronies—my Russian was poor, you see. I told him about my sister and my mother and my father. I can’t remember if I was drunk or just horribly homesick.

Do you know, he loved it. He called me an assortment of interesting terms of endearments, mostly relating to my being a princess of various African locales I had neither been to nor heard of before. That stopped, of course, when I ended up in difficulty. I wrote him a letter. He found the idea that he might have to lay claim, even in the privacy of his own mind, to a coloured woman’s child, entirely insupportable. I received a curt letter from lawyer informing me that I was in danger of courting a libel case, and nothing else. He never wrote back—not until last year, when he seemed to honestly expect me to be hiding a little Creole-royal child of his behind my skirts, living in romantic poverty somewhere in a rural part of France, ready to be rescued by my repentant prince, even though I was well-known at that point in Paris—as a childless, husbandless singer of some wealth and some scandal. Again, how difficult it is to deal with these people who deny the evidence in front of their eyes and get angry when proven incontrovertibly incorrect.

I am distracted. I blame watching you—you are still asleep, of course—where was I? Oh, the necklace. Yes. Well, of course I could hardly get my revenge upon the Prince of Wales himself, not then, but it was very important to me to do something to the Maypins, and I did. So, there: that is my confession. Naturally it shall be useless to you in this form, as this letter is full of things you do not wish to show to the public, and I hear that evidence which has been tampered with is simply not at all the thing, but with the necklace and your mind I am entirely confident you could bring me to justice—if you so choose.

So why am I giving it to you? Perhaps because I trust you; perhaps to give you a choice; perhaps because I want the damnable thing off my hands. Perhaps because I think diamonds would be breathtaking pressed between that stern white throat and those stern white shirts. It could be for any reason, really.

You have just stirred in your sleep. For a moment I froze, half afraid and half glad, uncertain what to do. But of course, you are still dreaming, with the light from the window tickling your cheek and your fingers twitching on the pillow like you desperately want a cigarette even in your sleep. I can hardly say you look young or innocent or even relaxed—you are frowning, and I should like to smooth the line out with my thumb but it would wake you up and ruin everything—but you are there for me to see. And this is such an absurd letter to write, Mr Holmes; you see, I wrote it in the hope that I would give myself time to think, because I have a choice to make: to wake you or not?

I should wake you. I should ask if you want to come with me. But I don’t think I can take any chances with my escape this morning. I have to leave. Every part of me is crying out to leave.

You feel betrayed. Of course you do. I suspect you won’t mind, really, that I deceived you—that was, after all, purely business, and if anything, after your frustration is over, I secretly suspect you will be amused and appreciative—but I also left you to wake up alone, and that was callous, perhaps. But I am not running away from you—merely cutting myself free of everything else which has tried to wind itself around my bones like so much ivy. Should you ever feel the need to do the same you will find my door open to you—if you can find my door, that is.

So now I repeat to you the words which Godfrey will read when she opens a brown paper envelope identical to the one in which she handed over my letters and photographs to her banker, weighted with one note and a sheaf of blank paper: ‘Forgive me if you feel like it, and I shall do the same to you.’ I should like to say that you are not the finest man of my acquaintance, nor the most extraordinary woman, but rather the most singular detective I have ever known. And I remain, my dear Mr Sherlock Holmes, very sincerely,

yours,

IRENE ADLER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...you've read it _all_?
> 
> I would like to say a real and earnest thank you for reading. This fic is distinctly odd, often not exactly what I planned and more than a little self-indulgent, but I'm proud of myself for getting it finished, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Just with hopefully less stress and fewer hours thinking about Victorian underwear.
> 
>  **"the room"** \- I should really have included this in the notes for the last chapter, but I'm forgetful. My descriptions of Holmes' room are based on what I saw at the [Sherlock Holmes Museum](http://www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk/) in London which, yes, I have been to. Queued in the rain for, in fact. No one can judge me. Here is a [visual reference](http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/39962998.jpg) for what Holmes' bedroom looks like there—the bedroom described here is not totally cribbed from it, just inspired by it, and I don't know if the photo actually does it justice. When I went in there, I was really interested in the size (rather small) and the sense of quietness inside it, and that fueled a lot of Irene's observations in...the previous chapter, yes. As I say. Forgetful.
> 
>  **"the buttons at Irene’s hip"** \- Did you know, most ladies' drawers in the Victorian era were crotchless? Understandable, given how many other layers they were in. But I didn't feel like this was something I could write in and explain/make believable in the actual narrative, especially when the underwear Irene is wearing is supposed to be so conservative. (Nb: cotton drawers really...weren't, Irene is just being picky and finding things to laugh at). So, unusual closed drawers.
> 
>  **"upstairs to the bathroom"** \- They turned the lumber room which was there in 1887 (according to the Adventure of the Five Pips) into a bathroom. Says I. What? Shut up. I got annoyed looking at plans of 221B.


End file.
